Lamar | “The education and purification of Lear” |
Wilson | ‘To Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Cornwall nature is a force encouraging the individual to think only of the fulfilment of their own desire’ |
Genesis | The world came out of nothing |
Danby | ‘A play dramatising the meaning of the single word nature’ |
Harold Bloom | “For those who believe that divine justice somehow prevails in this world, King Lear ought to be offensive.” |
Johnson | “A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry”– it is debatable who the wicked and virtuous actually are |
Sun | “Under his clothes, the King is equal to the beggar” |
Isaac Asamov | “of course, is the great secret of the successful fool – that he is no fool at all.’- In his Guide to Shakespeare |
Dollimore | “the Gods are at best callously just…at worst sadistically vindictive” |
Elton | Cordelia is “defined as a Christ-like figure, therefore her downfall is a direct representation of a God-less society” |
Hudson | Goneril and Regan are “personifications of ingratitude” |
Paul Delany | See Edmund typifying the new bourgeois ethic of individual materialism- MARXIST |
Hare | “One must be poor to be rich, a fool to be wise and blind to see” |
Schlegel | “The principle characters are not those who act, but those who suffer” |
Coleridge on Edmund | “Edmund is the main agent” |
Coleridge on Lear | Lear’s madness an ‘eddy without progression’ |
Lamb | “A happy ending! As if the living martyrdom that Lear has gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him’ |
AC Bradley on Lear | ‘The Redemption of Lear to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life’ |
AC Bradley | Character and plot interdependent |
G Wilson Knight | ‘humour which treads the brink of tears’ |
G Wilson Knight on Lear | ‘if Lear could laugh there would be no tragedy’ |
Enid Wellesford | ‘the simplicity of a morality play’ |
R B Heilman | ‘the children as a group represent the conflicting characteristics of the father’ |
B Everett | Christian allegorical interpretation takes the play’s statement without reference to the plot….Cordelia as Christ |
Pascal | “La grandeur de l’homme en ce qu’il se connait miserable” |
John Holloway | “the end of the world in Elizabethan values; a potentiality to chaos in the world of Nature’ |
John Holloway on the ending | ‘love is finite and inadequate…love as duty’ |
John Holloway on human nature | “If the play advances a positive, I think it is that when men turn away from how they should live, there are forces in life which constrain them to return’ |
N Frye | “do not merely seek his death but his annihilation” |
J Kott | “‘King Lear’ makes a mockery of all systems of values: both Medieval and Renaissance values disintegrate.” |
J Kott on Gloucester | “Gloucester is Everyman” – importance of the journey motif |
King Lear Critics
July 8, 2019