| George Orwell | Edgar is a superfluous character |
| Leo Tolstoy | A tedious nuisance |
| Nahum Tate | The ending was too misfortunate and cruel |
| Gillian Woods | His unexplained absence is appropriate since he exists outside the proper order of things |
| Leo Tolstoy | Lear’s madness had no relationship to the play’s major themes |
| Jonathan Bate | Of all Shakespeare’s plays it is the closest to Ancient Greek tragedy |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Goneril and Regan are the only picture of the unnatural in ‘King Lear’ |
| Arnold Kettler | Lear’s madness is not so much a breakdown as a breakthrough |
| Carol Rutter | The play is overwhelmingly about fathers and their paternity |
| George Orwell | Certainly not Christian |
| AC Bradley | Edgar is the most religious |
| Charles Lamb | To see Lear tottering about on a rainy night, turned out of doors by his daughters has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting |
| Southward | Although it eventually destroys him, Lear achieves true majesty through the course of his struggle |
| G. Wilson Knight | Lear is redeemed through suffering |
| Rebecca Warrens | The alacrity of Edmund’s rise and the fact that the faithless, worldly bastard is responsible for Cordelia’s death suggests man is as powerful and cruel as any force above |
| Wilson Knight | The tragedy is most poignant in that it is purposeless, unreasonable |
| W. Empson | The ways that the gods delegate justice is by inventing instruments of torture |
| Hal Hoolbrook | Despite all evidence of the contrary, Lear has stuck steadfastly to the conviction that he is a loving father |
| Katherine Mcluskie | Family relations in the play are seen as fixed and determined |
| Leonard Tennenhouse | ‘King Lear’ shows us the dangers of not following the old ways of the patriarchal order |
Ao5 King Lear
July 23, 2019