King Lear critics A05 + AO3 Flashcards
Presentation of women
Emma Smith
“As tragic characters realise their place in the cosmos, they secure this by denigrating or blaming women”
“Lear’s three daughters are thus limited by stereotypes – both positive and negative – rather than being allowed any more complex destiny as women”
Edgar and Poor Tom
Richard Mccoy
“In this new guise, he appears as the chivalric embodiment of heroic virtue”
Lear’s relationship with Cordelia
Stanley Cavell
“He is not experiencing reconciliation with a daughter, but partnership in a mystic marriage’’
Chaos - Storozynsky
Storozynsky
“King Lear has been called ‘a play about the end of the world’ but it is also a story of creation and destruction and especially of separation and division”
Lear and Gloucester parallels
Storozynsky
“As short sighted as Lear, Gloucester is easy prey to the power of suggestion” - Trope of good being gullible
“Lear and Gloucester turn to Nature to learn what they could not learn in a sophisticated court environment”
Gloucester’s blinding
A.C Bradley
“The blinding brings home the harshest of realities: it forces us to acknowledge our capacity for cruelty and it also forces a radical reassessment of our ideas about justice” LINK TO CONTEXT: Challenges contemporary violence used to punish and persecute
Justice
Peat - “While he (Gloucester) is off stage the word “justice” rings in the air as Lear holds a mock trial of an imaginary Gonerill and Regan. The scene that follows will provide an ironic reversal when Gloucester is the accused at a real trial in which Cornwall and Regan play the “False justices””
Peat staging
Peat - “At the Globe, with the audience around three sides of the stage and with many overlooking it, Shakespeare needed the two servants for masking purposes”
Loyalty and goodness
Peat - “In the upsurge of guilt that follows, they (audience) want desperately to save Gloucester to salve their consciences and as if in response to their wishes, a servant steps forward”
Power
Kenneth Muir - “King Lear is a look at the worst; but it shows several characters refusing to compromise with evil and emerging from the struggle ennobled and purified and it also demonstrates the self-destructive effects of the ruthless pursuit of power.”
Religion
E.K Chambers
“The plot, which deliberately rejects the Christian interpretation of the universe, is set in a pagan environment. Pains are taken to avoid the introduction of Christian language or Christian sentiments.”
Is King Lear too complex?
George Orwell
King Lear “Has too many characters and sub-plots. One wicked daughter would have been quite enough”
Albany
J.W Mackail
Albany is generally thought of as of little importance. Really he is the pivot on which the play turns. He is central, inasmuch as he is the one character in the whole play who is from first to last completely sane, balanced and normal.
Act 1 scene 4 Tony Blake
“Now that he (King Lear) is being treated with undisguised contempt, he is shaken to the very core of his being. This incident marks the beginning of Lear’s battle to retain his sanity”
ANALYSIS: Madness is highlighted from the first scene
Edmund Tony Blake
“Anyone whom he percieves as a potential threat in his quest for ultimate power is to be eliminated”
