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Summary Edexcel A-level English Literature: Drama - King Lear critics notes
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1) A. C. Bradley ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ (1904) CHRISTIAN PARABLE
Tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death
Suffering and calamity are exceptional…as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory
A tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play…a total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who ‘stood in high degree’
Made them feel that man is blind and helpless, the plaything of an inscrutable power, called by the name of Fortune or some other name – a
power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden strike him down in his pride
His fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire; and when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall
produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and the omnipotence…of Fortune or Fate
There’s nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than Shakespeare’s exposition of the effect of suffering
2) G. Wilson Knight ‘The Wheel of Fire’ (1930) CHRISTIAN PARABLE
For Wilson Knight Lear was Shakespeare’s Purgatorio and Book of Job rolled into one (Edgar = Job)
3) W. R. Elton ‘King Lear and the Gods’ (1966) EXISTENTIALIST
The last scene, shatters more violently than an earlier apostasy might have done, the foundations of faith itself
4) Jan Kott ‘Shakespeare our Contemporary’ (1965) EXISTENTIALIST
His influential essay ‘King Lear, or Endgame’ developed this existential angle further by drawing a connection to the contemporary Theatre of
the Absurd
5) Arnold Kettle ‘Shakespeare in a Changing World’ (1964) MARXIST
His story, put in its simplest terms, is the story of his progress from being a king to being a man
6) Margot Heinemann ‘Demystifying the Mystery of State’: King Lear and the World Upside Down’ (1991) MARXIST
, Both as an individual’s loss of power and control and as the breakdown of a social and political system
To present images of king and queens as simultaneously holders of sacred office and fallible human beings who may be weak
Optimistic confidence in political action to fulfil national destiny gave place to a sense of history as tragedy
The patriarchalist view of monarchy that equates kingly power with the power of the father within the family
Goneril, Regan, and Edmund […] who were being rewarded for their obsequiousness with land, monopolies, offices, and gifts
The horror of a society divided between extremes of rich and poor […] Lear himself, like the faithful Gloucester, discovers this only when his
own world is turned upside down and he himself is destitute and mad and at last sees authority with the eyes of the dispossessed
7) Kathleen McLuskie ‘The Patriarchal Bard’ (1985) FEMINIST
Sees Shakespeare’s vision as conventional and conservative and his portrayal of female characters as misogynistic
8) Coppelia Kahn ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’ (1986) FEMINIST
Identifies a tragedy of masculinity which spells out the terrible personal and collective price paid by a culture dedicated to repressing the
vulnerability, dependency, and capacity for feeling which are called “feminine”
Towards acceptance of the woman in himself
Represents a feminist-psychoanalytic critical approach
9) Carol Rutter ‘Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear’ (1997) FEMINIST
Patriarchal anxieties about effeminization
Makes male banter the site of social intercourse
Lust in the loins drives man to the fire where the mother incinerates him, dust to dust
His tears of impotent rage are indeed the sign of the female
He appropriated women’s discourse: he fell to cursing
When they are authorised to “speak” they begin the reactive process to Lear’s effeminization
They now assume the male voice, the male space Lear abandons
The two who speak are monsters; the one who does not is monstered…that good women keep their mouths shut
What, then, does it mean in this theatre to say “Nothing”?
10) Leah Marcus ‘King Lear on St Stephen’s Night, 1606’ (1988) NEW HISTORICIST
Locates the significance of the play in one performance (given to King James on the feast of St Stephen, a day associated with charity for the poor)
though she finds that the message could have been taken either as a reminder to the king to not neglect his subjects or as a cloaked exhortation to
Parliament to respond more generously to their sovereign’s demands
11) Leonard Tennenhouse ‘The Theatre of Punishment’ (1986) NEW HISTORICIST
Adheres to the idea that the Jacobean theatre was primarily an arena for the legitimation of the ruling power
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