King Lear Critics

Front 1

R.W. Chambers (gen)

Back 1

"King Lear is a vast poem on the victory of true love; Lear, consoled, ends by teaching patience to Gloucester and Cordelia"

Front 2

Heilman (gen)

Back 2

the natural order of King Lear is an "informing principle" by which the play world is organized into "a desirable and permanent order of things". It functions through the maintenance of "set relationships, duties, obligations and sanctions"

Front 3

Drakakis, Shakespearean Tragedy (gen)

Back 3

"The paradox which King Lear explores is that it is 'natural' for the human animal to transcend its own limits, yet this creative tendency to exceed oneself is also the source of destructiveness."

Front 4

Kettle (gen)

Back 4

"In King Lear, Shakespeare reveals, from the very start, a society in turmoil in which it is the representatives of the old order who feel that everything is out of joint."

Front 5

Kettle (gen)

Back 5

"Lear is a world in which the old order is decadent and the new people unprincipled and both, as the treatment of Cordelia shows, inhuman."

Front 6

Welsford (Fool)

Back 6

"his tactless jokes and snatches of songs spring so evidently from genuine grief"

Front 7

Goldsmith (Fool)

Back 7

the fool is "Lear's alter ego, his externalised conscience"

Front 8

Josephine Bennet (Fool)

Back 8

"bitter jests counter and balance Lear's bitter thoughts. Where Lear blames his daughters, the Fool blames Lear"

Front 9

Lowe (Fool)

Back 9

"The juxtaposition of the Fool's perceptiveness and wisdom and Lear's lack of it solidifies in the audience's mind the folly that causes Lear's downfall"

Front 10

Bloom (Fool)

Back 10

"you could remove the Fool and not alter much in the way of plot structures, but you would remove out the surrogate from the play, for the Fool is the true voice of our feeling"

Front 11

Eagleton (Fool)

Back 11

"to know your own nothingness is to become something, as the Fool is wiser than fools because he knows his own folly and so can see through theirs"

Front 12

Kott (Fool)

Back 12

"The Fool does not follow any ideology... He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order... The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognise this world as rational"

Front 13

Stuart (Lear)

Back 13

"Lear would rather have flattery than truth"

Front 14

Tiffany Liao (Lear)

Back 14

"De Grazia uses superflux to describe the play's excessive materiality in terms of Lear's physical possessions. This notion of overwhelming and disruptive excess can also be applied to the abstract; specifically, Lear's multiple identities. I propose that Lear descends into a mental state of chaotic disorder because this superflux disrupts the natural order of the play world"

Front 15

W.R. Elton (G+R)

Back 15

"Goneril's world is a visible one, without cosmic hierarchy and principle, and must be constructed through frenzied acquisition, status claims and opportunistic.; lacking Cordelia's bond, G ironically creates disorder and is in herself an aspect of disorder - chaos and evil being twins in the Elizabethan view"

Front 16

Kettle (Cordelia)

Back 16

"Towards the end of the play Cordelia... is seen as the alternative to the old order (which by her honesty she has exposed) and to the new people who hate and fear her"

Front 17

Johnson (gen)

Back 17

"A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry" (though it's debatable who the 'wicked' and the 'virtuous' are

Front 18

Goldberg (gen)

Back 18

"The play does not offer us a guaranteed moral vantage point"

Front 19

Dollimore (gen)

Back 19

"The gods are at best callously just, and at worst, sadistically vindictive"