King Lear AO5

Paul W. Kahn (Postmodern) “If there was no justice in Edmund’s plan, neither was there any justice in Edgar’s legal entitlement.”
W.H. Clement (Modern) “Goneril, Regan and Edmund are the calculating, cool and unimaginative people who are ‘incapable’ of creative imagery”
Johnathan Goldberry “Kent serves the authority of goodness”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge “Courage, Intellect and strength of character were the most impressive forms of power” (Edmund)
John Danby Lear + Cordelia as virtuous and ideal/ Edmund and the sisters as a greedy representation of capitalism (WW2)
Nahum Tate Cordelia alive + with Edgar in the end, but Shakespeare would have seen Cordelia as a martyr.
Sigmund Freud “She is the death Goddess” (Cordelia)
Frank Kermode “Lear’s rage confirms that he cannot be temperate in the absence of ceremony”
Coppelia Kahn “Lear wants two mutually exclusive things at once: to have absolute power over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependant on them.”
Coppelia Kahn This play is about “Male Anxiety”.
Morris and Fleissner (Post-Modern) Cordelia deserves her fate.
Samuel Johnson (1700) Cordelia’s death is “Immoral and unjust”.
Martha Burns (feminist) Goneril and Regan are “formidable”
2017 Johnathan Munby production Addition of “what” to Goneril’s reaction to the division of the kingdom into 3.
Dervla Kerwin “Lear’s family is an extension of his ego”
Dervla Kerwin “Edgar has all the traits that Lear didn’t”
Dervla Kerwin “When there is no woman to balance a narcissistic man you’re going to have a monster for a child”
Dervla Kerwin “In her world compassion and sympathy are luxuries” (Goneril)
Dervla Kerwin “Regan is intoxicated by the power given to her”
Alexander Leggart “Tom is a more recognisable character than Edgar… he is truly outside society”
Thomas Hobbes Human’s are at their core selfish and absolute monarchy is the best politics. (Edmund)
G Wilson Knight “Edmund obeys nature’s laws of selfishness”
Sigmund Freud “The madman is a dreamer awake”
John W. Draper “Chaos from conflict of authority is the entire essence of the play”
Andrew Hadfield “A monarch cutting himself off from the people he rules and so destroying what he has carefully built up.”
Michael Ignatieff “The heath is both a real place and a place in the mind”
Janel Adelman The heath is “a projection outward of everything he cannot tolerate within” (Lear)
Psychodynamic The storm is the representation of Lear’s repressed ID.
Ian McKellen Lear is sexually repressed.
Julian Markels “The conflict between the old binding royalty and the new boundless individualism”
Samuel Johnson “Too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition”
Modern Theatre Interpreting Regan as sexually aroused be Gloucester’s blinding.
L. C. Knights “The decay and fall of the world”
King James I “Kings are rightly called Gods for they exercise a manner of resemblance of divine power upon earth”
William R. Elton (modern) “The last act shatters the foundations of faith itself”
Isaac Asimov “The great secret of a successful fool is that he is no fool at all”
John Donelly “With no male character in the drama does Lear have a good relationship”
Elizabeth I “I would not open windows into men’s souls” (Religion)
July 28, 2019