King Lear Critics Flashcards by Victoria Adams

Elton.

(Last act) shatters the foundations…

…of faith itself

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Cedric watts.

It raises enduring questions about human nature, human…

…suffering, morality, religion and life’s significance

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Watts.

We find incongruous…

…mixtures of weakness and strength

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Wilson knight.

Argues that in KL, tragedy is perilously close to…

…bathos, absurdity and grotesque humour

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Troilus and Cressida.

Sp suggests that when human beings deny divinely-ordained…

…principles of cooperation, the result may be an irrevocable collapse of order

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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

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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

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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

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Rosinger.

Claims the play is about G and L’s self discovery after..

…treating others as a means of self gratification

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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

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Psychoanalytical.

Personality is a result of unconscious and irrational desires…

…repressed memories or wishes, sexuality, fantasy, anxiety and conflict

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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

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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

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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

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Feminism.

Social anxieties are displaced onto…

…sexuality, giving rise to the concern about women who posed a threat to male authority.

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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

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Hudson.

G&R are personifications…

…of ingratitude

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Jan Kott.

All that remains at the end…

…is the earth, empty and bleeding

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Johnson.

A play in which the wicked prosper…

…and the virtuous miscarry

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Sun.

Under the clothes, the king…

…is equal to the beggar

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Dollimore.

The gods are at best callously just…

…and at worst sadistically vindictive

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Brandes.

views Cordelia as ‘the living emblem of womanly dignity…

…while the play as a whole portrayed the ‘titanic tragedy of human life

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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

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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

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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