M S and L critics Flashcards
LEAR Cordelia
John DANBY ‘She is the norm by which the wrongness’ is judged
LEAR Goneril and Regan’s sins
‘these are not only personal sins, but an upsetting of civilised values’
What is the principle theme of the play?
LAMAR ‘the education and purification of Lear’
BLOOM For those who believe that divine justice somehow prevails in this world, King Lear ought to be offensive
LEAR justice
Goldberg ‘There is no supernatural justice- only human natural justice’
LEAR the fool
“Shakespeare uses the beings that his world deems lowly and foolish to destabilize conventional wisdom about class and to subvert the hierarchal expectations of his culture.” - Cheri Y. Halvorson;
LEAR nature
"”King Lear” can be regarded as a play dramatising the meaning of the single word ‘nature’” - J.F. Danby
Who believed that virtue triumphed at the end of Lear?
Bradley
The play ‘King Lear’ is monstrously unjust
Todorov
The idea of an equilibrium in society, and the desire to break/create a new equilibrium.
Lear: under the fine…
Frank Kermode: Under the fine clothes, there is nothing but greed and lust
LEAR the effect of the play
C.J. Sisson - The play destabilises our theological and moral assurances
GREENBLATT - King Lear is “part of an intense and sustained struggle in late sixteenth- and early seven- teenth-century england to redefine the central values of society”
LEAR good v bad
JOHNSON A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry
LEAR britain
KNIGHT King Lear is representative of “not ancient Britain, but humanity, not England, but the World”
LEAR G and R are
HUDSON Goneril and Regan are “personifications of ingratitude”
Which critic saw Edmund as typifying the new bourgeois ethic of individual materialism
Paul Delany - Marxist
LEAR binary opposites
HARE One must be poor to be rich, a fool to be wise and blind to see
Who focused on absence of mother figure?
Coppelia Kahn: (psych and fem)
- Lear fails because he fights against his own repressed need for a mother figure
- G and R, with no maternal guide, have grown up selfish and heartless
LEAR suffering/C’s death
SALGADO the very pointlessness of Cordelia’s death and Lear’s suffering is the point.’
LEAR Lear’s character
SALGADO King, a father, a master and a man. As the action develops, the first three roles are stripped from him and he is forced to consider what the last of them means.’
LEAR moral vantage point?
GOLDBERG ‘the play does not offer us anything like… a guaranteed moral vantage point’
LEAR Shakespearean tragedy?
KASTAN sees S’s tragedy as intense treatments of age-old question about whether the cause of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution, or arbitrary fate
LEAR the ending
ROCHE “as bleak and unrewarding as man can reach outside the gates of hell”
LEAR events following his abdication
MACK “the waiting coil of consequences”
LEAR the fool
KOTT He is the only character to realise that “the only true madness is to regard the world as rational”
LEAR common humanity
BRADLEY Lear learns to “pierce through rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath”
LEAR animal imagery
CHURCH The vast amount of animal imagery in the play “seems to say that the underlying nature of human beings is that of the worst jungle animals”
LEAR bonds
O’Toole “Duty and bonds are the values of a feudal society, ‘how much?’ is the basic question of a capitalist one. Lear breaks the bonds, bringing his kingdom and all the fixed relationships within it tumbling down with the question ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’”
LEAR feminist
McLUSKIE The play is ultimately anti-feminist,
LEAR father-daughter relationship
NOVY King Lear criticises the powerful rights fathers held over their daughters; Lear abuses his authority over Cordelia, and then needs her forgiveness. The balance of the patriarchal structure is subsequently threatened, as the traditional ruler-subject relationship is upset
LEAR a negative view of his madness
TOLSTOY ‘senseless, inappropriate words’
Kermode distrusts criticism that seeks to redefine the play for each successive generation of academics
‘being patient of interpretation’ the play is timeless, always relevant
LEAR hierarchy
HALVERSON “Shakespeare’s reasons for not using a person of equal rank to set another straight may be an indication of his own opinions about social hierarchy.”
LEAR themes?
CHURCH Naked ambition and jealousy appear to ride roughshod over what should be the true relationship between a father and his children, a master and his servants.
LEAR heath scenes
They have become voices rather than people,
Lear capitalism and selfishness
FROAN The play is an early critique of capitalism and selfishness
KNIGHTS
a microcosm of the human race
LEAR disintegration
KOLT King Lear is about the disintegration of the world
LEAR ‘a destructive reversal of the rightful order’
McCluskie
LEAR religion?
MAXWELL A christian play about a pagan world
LEAR reveals from the very start, a society in turmoil
KETTLE
LEAR elton
the actions of an upside down providence in an apparently deranged universe
The last act shatters the foundations of faith itself
