King Lear Critics Flashcards
Elton.
(Last act) shatters the foundations…
…of faith itself
Cedric watts.
It raises enduring questions about human nature, human…
…suffering, morality, religion and life’s significance
Watts.
We find incongruous…
…mixtures of weakness and strength
Wilson knight.
Argues that in KL, tragedy is perilously close to…
…bathos, absurdity and grotesque humour
Troilus and Cressida.
Sp suggests that when human beings deny divinely-ordained…
…principles of cooperation, the result may be an irrevocable collapse of order
Mcluskie.
Explores the relationship between power and gender, finishing that insubordination…
…by female characters results in chaos as it threatens the balance of power within the family: women with opinions frighten men
Mcluskie.
Fundamentally misogynistic. A paradigm for the sexual politics of the genre…
…the protagonist is always make with male concerns. sp aligns anarchy and sexual insubordination
Kahn.
Reason for Lear’s failure is that he fights down the repressed need for a mother figure. Lear’s progress from…
…misogynist to accepting of womanly values. Exploration of male anxiety. Hysteria characterised as feminine
Rosinger.
Claims the play is about G and L’s self discovery after..
…treating others as a means of self gratification
Marianne Novy.
Suggests king Lear critics the powerful rights fathers held over their daughters….
Lead abuses his authority over Cordelia and then needs her forgiveness
Psychoanalytical.
Personality is a result of unconscious and irrational desires…
…repressed memories or wishes, sexuality, fantasy, anxiety and conflict
Feminism.
Women as property-male possessions. Critics challenge the traditional portrayal of women as…
…examples of virtue or vice. They are like male characters, complex and flawed experiencing similar emotions to men
Liberal humanism.
Sought to demonstrate how tragedy was concerned with morality- showing man seeking good…
…but failing to do so, enduring suffering but achieving some kind of self knowledge and spiritus enlightenment
Hotson.
For in the place of a philosopher playing the wit-crazed fool, this more universal…
…tragedy presents the true idiot fool urging sharp truths in a vain attempt to make his master see better
Feminism.
Social anxieties are displaced onto…
…sexuality, giving rise to the concern about women who posed a threat to male authority.
Recent criticism.
Tended to sentimentalise the fool or view him as the key to the whole play…
… The intelligent outsider, loyal and decent who represents common sense
Hudson.
G&R are personifications…
…of ingratitude
Jan Kott.
All that remains at the end…
…is the earth, empty and bleeding
Johnson.
A play in which the wicked prosper…
…and the virtuous miscarry
Sun.
Under the clothes, the king…
…is equal to the beggar
Dollimore.
The gods are at best callously just…
…and at worst sadistically vindictive
Brandes.
views Cordelia as ‘the living emblem of womanly dignity…
…while the play as a whole portrayed the ‘titanic tragedy of human life
Bruce.
Views Cordelia to be a ‘figure whose loyalty withstands any horror that the…
…hegemonic, aristocratic and patriarchal order can throw at them: tyrannical anger, expulsion and banishment
Greenblatt.
Contends that Lear ‘wishes to be the object- the preferred and even…
…the soul recipient of his child’s love. Plays central concern is Lear’s selfishness
Machiavelli.
For one can say this generally of men: that they are ingratdful, fickle…
…pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of the danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours
Burto.
In this play, love humanises as surely…
….as egoism dehumanises
Burto.
If the play dramatises mans desolation, it also dramatises the love that, whilst…
…providing no protection against pain or death, makes mans life different from the life of a dog, a horse or a rat
Campbell.
Walking clear-eyed into the stormy night and his probable death…
….on the Heath, he comes as close as any fool does to the heroic
Campbell.
He is the supremely wise fool who expressed in his heartfelt…
…devotion to Cordelia and his kind the Christian virtues of patience, humanity and love
Kierman.
Argues that Shakespeare’s concern was for the poor whose…
…toil and suffering pays for the pleasures and follies of the rich
Kierman.
Shakespeare works on our imagination, keeping the poor an invisible…
…but compelling presence… Shakespeare leaves us to hope that someday the masses will stand up for themselves
Dussinberre.
Shakespeare saw men and women as equal…
…in a world that declared them as unequal
Dusinberre.
He did not divide human nature into the…
…masculine and feminine. ‘He refused to separate their worlds physically, intellectually and spiritually
Lever.
The fundamental flaw is the…
…world they inhabit: in the political state, the social order it upholds
Lever.
In Jacobean tragedy it is not primarily the conduct of the individual…
…but the society which assails him, that stands condemned
A.c.bradley.
Argues that king lear ends with ‘a sense of law and beauty…
…a consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we cannot fathom
Steiner.
There is in the final moments of great tragedy…a fusion of grief and joy…
…of lament over the fall of man and of rejoicing in the resurrection of his spirit
Hunter.
It not only strips and reduces and assaults human dignity, but because it also shows…
…with the greatest force and detail the process of restoration by which humanity can recover degradation
Johnson.
Trying to please the audience…
…for which he wrote
Johnson.
Villainy is never at a stop, that crimes…
…lead to crimes and at last terminate to ruin
Johnson.
Just a representation of the…
…common events of human life
Johnson.
It is disputed whether the predominant image in Lear’s disordered mind be…
…the loss of his kingdom or the cruelty of his daughters
Johnson.
Did we not rather consider the…
…injured father than the degrading king
Dollimore.
Tragedies display ‘a kind of intellectual vandalism’ because they…
…expose the injustices and inequalities of society. Questions the beliefs and structures which maintain those unfair practices- social reality
Cedric watts.
Through suffering, people who were once right and powerful…
….may come to appreciate the needs of the poor and humble, and advocate charitable provision
Watts.
Both stories show a noble figure…
…being reduced to a hapless dependence on others
Watts.
Some of the most remarkable breaches of realism…
…occur when the fool jokes at the expense of the audience in the theatre
Watts.
The prevailingly grim atmosphere of king Lear makes…
…the fools banter with the audience oddly discordant
Duthie.
God overthrows the absolutely evil- he destroys…
…the Cornwalls, the gonerils, the regans: he is just
Duthie.
God chastens those who err but who can be regenerated…
…the Lear’s, the gloucesters- and in mercy he redeems them: he is just and merciful
Duthie.
He deals strange with the Cordelias…
…of this world. His methods are inscrutable
Watts.
The dramatic questioning of nature, morality…
….reason and order, and in its eloquent voicing of a gamut of human emotions
Watts.
There was no precedent for the harrowing bleakness, the ruthless…
…ironies and the harsh accidentality of the conclusion
Watts.
King Lear reminds us of the human…
…capacity for hatred, cruelty and injustice
Watts.
It also reminds us of…
…the human capacity for love and forgiveness
Watts.
The notion that there’s one law for….
…the rich and the harsher law for the poor: money masks corruption
Ian mckellen.
Bullying daughters, ‘perhaps explains why the two…
…elder daughters have the characters they do
S.r.b.
Throwing tables over- emphasises rage and madness. They don’t get the chance…
…that’s what makes it so unbelievably devastating
Sam mendes.
Lear kills fool-beats him death…
…in this world his death is ‘not significant
Peter Brooke- Kenneth tynan.
Black and white- the play is a…
…mighty philosophical farce
Kenneth Tynan.
Resembles at the end a desert graveyard or unpeopled plant…
…it is an ungoverned world…a world without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution
S.r.b he starts the play with…
…a catastrophic, criminal mistake
S.r.b a man who has been in absolute power…
…far too long for his own sanity
S.r.b.
It is not irreparable, his relationship with Cordelia. What is…
…irreparable is giving the kingdom away
S.r.b.
Fractured and damaged relationship…
…that needs time, and they’re not given time. I think that’s devastating
S.r.b.
World so grotesquely distorted by time the fool disappears…
…‘horrible world of violence, grief and anger
Tom brook-Edgar
The atmosphere is one of…
…suspicion and paranoia
Stephen boxer.-g
The first half is his fall from grace. It’s about a political state…
….and a familial state and how they intertwine and fall apart
Ian mckellen.
The audience should look at his relationship with the gods to understand his progression. ‘He goes on a…
…torturous and terrifying emotional journey
Ian mckellen.
By the end he’s achieved some reconciliation to his own position in the real world and that..
…included love for family, respect and regard for friends and that has by the end, nothing to do with the gods
Kate fleetwood-gon
I felt that she was…
…a neglected child
Olivia vinall-c
She wants to assert herself as…
…a woman, which she is about to become
Kermode.
So concerns himself with the 2 bodies of the King, one lives by ceremony…
….administers justice in a furred gown. ‘The other is born naked, subject to disease and pain. Lear is stripped
Freud.
Man is a savage beast to whom…
…consideration to his own kind is something alien
D.j. Enright
The principal characters are…
…not those who act but those who suffer
Mcluskie
Women are made either to submit-Cordelia….
…or to be destroyed- g and r
Mcluskie
Family relations in this play are seen as fixed and determined…
…and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of the natural order
Holbrook
Boisterous, demanding, arrogant…
…he expects absolute obedience
Holbrook
He has clung steadfastedly to the conviction that….
…he is a loving father
Holbrook
The paranoia of age…
…is stalking him
Holbrook
The coils of evil spread and…
…fester in the subplot of the play
Mcluskie
Cordelias return is a…
…restoration of patriarchy
Noble.
The dynamics of the play…
…emanate from damaged families
Jan Kott.
King Lear is about…
…the degradation of the world
John Knox.
Women-inconstant, variable, cruel. Weak…
…frail, impatient, feeble and foolish
