| Andrew Green on truth | the audience is continually forced to recognise the gap which lies between utterance and truth |
| Giles Block on words | in plays it is usually the one who has the best words who comes out on top |
| Giles Block on rhyme | the language of spells |
| Charles Lamb | Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage |
| Dr Samuel Johnson | contrary to the natural ideas of justice |
| Coleridge | like the hurricane and the whirlpool |
| Susan Bruce on Bastards | Bastards are evil in Renaissance drama because . . . they have a clear motive to contest the hegemonic ideology |
| Terry Eagleton on the Fool | the Fool is wiser than fools because he knows his own folly and so can see through theirs |
| Terry Eagleton on Cordelia | spokeswoman for the material bonds of kinship |
| Terry Eagleton on Language | Language, like much else in the play, has a problem in pitching itself at an elusive point between too much and too little |
| Terry Eagleton on Edmund | He is a self-creating opportunist who can manipulate others’ appetites to his own advantage precisely because he knows his own so well |
| Aristotle | Hamartia, Peripeteia, Anagnorisis |
| Terence Hawkes on Love | from the first moments of the play, a wholly debased kind of ‘loving’ can be seen to operate |
| Terence Hawkes on Edmund | he is the product of lust, not love . . . inevitably, he will be tainted by such a background |
| Nietzsche | the self-oblivion of the Dionysiac – Apollonian |
| Kathleen McLuskie on Feminism | Feminism cannot simply take ‘the woman’s part’ when that part has been so morally loaded and theatrically circumscribed |
| Arnold Kettle on Edmund | Edmund has none of his father’s amiable, conservative illusions. He is intelligent, active and ruthless |
| Arnold Kettle on Edmund Summary | man with the lid off |
| Arnold Kettle on the storm | the storm in Lear ‘works’ artistically on a number of levels |
| Arnold Kettle on G and R | they are at once shrewd, able, shallow and morally impervious, and they are rivals because they are alike |
| Arnold Kettle on Lear’s Madness | Lear’s madness is not so much a breakdown as a breakthrough. It is necessary |
| Arnold Kettle on Cordelia | she seems to express in her very person the ‘better way’ to which Lear has come through |
| Karl Marx | force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one |
| Gwynne Blakemore Evans on Lear | appears in the opening scene as justice itself |
| Kenneth Muir on Lear | loses the world and gains his soul |
| Kiernan Ryan on the Storm | the scene enforces the arresting realisation that distinctions of rank have no natural or intrinsic authority at all |
| Coppelia Kahn on Power | Lear’s very insistence on paternal power, in fact, belies its shakiness |
| Coppelia Kahn on Repression | In this patriarchal world, masculine identity depends on repressing the vulnerability |
| Coppelia Kahn on Shakespeare | I find family relationships and gender identity central to Shakespeare’s imagination |
| Lawrence Stone on Sixteenth-Century Families – 3 Ps | This sixteenth-century aristocratic family was patrilinear, primogenitural and patriarchal |
| James I | Kings are compared to fathers in families |
| Coppelia Kahn on Control and Dependence | He wants two mutually exclusive things at once: to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them |
| Freud | his majesty, the baby |
| Coppelia Kahn on Generational Conflict | generational conflicts entwine with and intensify gender conflicts |
| Coppelia Kahn on Goneril | stealthy and lustful |
| Kiernan Ryan on Catharthis | Shakespeare’s tragic vision affords no therapeutic catharsis |
| Kiernan Ryan on Alternative Potentiality | Shakespearean tragedy is defined by its organising awareness of alternative potentiality |
| Aristotle on Justice | Distributive and Retributive |
| Kiernan Ryan on Generational Conflicts | parallel generational conflicts which rip the families of Lear and Gloucester apart |
| Kiernan Ryan on the Fool | the Fool sardonically shuffles together bitter actualities |
| Graham Martins on King Lear | a pattern of carefully juxtaposed fragments |
| Graham Martins on Edmund | self-confident villainy of Edmund |
| Graham Martins on Edgar | he is the living symbol of the compassionate understanding that Lear begins to achieve |
| Graham Martins on Gloucester’s Sight | Gloucester, his eyes still intact, sees and does not recognise, hears and does not understand |
| Graham Martins on Gloucester | Gloucester is the devil |
| Graham Martins on Poor Tom | close to the state of the beast |
| Graham Martins on Edgar and Gloucester | the son has become his father’s father |
| Graham Martins on Albany | a ‘bitty’ part that never quite firms up |
| Graham Martins on Speech | speech is virtually the plays soul dimension |
| A. C. Bradley | psychological flaw |
| Jennifer Wallace on Aristotle | nearly all writing on tragedy returns to Aristotle |
| Hegel | tragedy dramatises the moment of collision between two equally justified powers |
King Lear Critics
July 15, 2019