 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
REFERENCETHE CRITICSTHE MESSAGE OF KING LEAR...the theme of King Lear may be stated in psychological as well as biological terms. So put, it is the destructive, the ultimately suicidal character of unregulated passion, its power to carry human nature back to chaos.... The predestined end of unmastered passion is the suicide of the species. That is the gospel according to King Lear. The play is in no small measure an actual representation of that process. The murder- suicide of Regan-Goneril is an example. But it is more than a picture of chaos and impending doom. What is the remedy for chaos? it asks. What can avert the doom? The characters who have mastered their passions give us a glimpse of the answer to those questions. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 1951 ON LEARThe initial act of the hero is his only act; the remainder is passion. An old and weary king, hungry for rest, banishes the one daughter who would give it to him and plunges at once into the long, loud night of his catastrophe. An early recognition of his error does not save him. The poet does not wish to save him, for his instinct is to develop a catastrophe as none has been developed before or since. Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare, 1939 Lear's progress- dramatic and spiritual- lies through a dissipation of egoism; submission to the cruelty of an indifferent Nature, less cruel to him than are his own kin; to ultimate loss of himself in madness. Harley Granville-Barker, Preface to Shakespeare, 1946 THE SECONDARY PLOTThe secondary plot fills out a story which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot, the tragic strength and stature being heightened by comparison with the slighter build of the former. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1983 ...the subplot simplifies the central action, translating its concerns into familiar (and therefore easily apprehensible) verbal and visual patterns. The subplot is easier to grasp because its characters tend to account for their sufferings in traditional moral language; it also pictorializes the main action, supplying interpreted visual emblems for some of the play's important themes. Bridget Gellert Lyons, "The subplot simplification in King Lear," from Some Facets of King Lear, Essays in Prismatic Criticism, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, 1974 THE STORMThe third act of King Lear, which covers the storm and its counterpart in human behavior, is a marvellous example of poetic elaboration for dramatic ends. At the center of it, at once the main protagonist and symbol of the spiritual state of a humanity exposed to fundamental disorder, wrenched out of its "fixed place" in the "frame of nature," stands the figure of an aged king. The intimate dovetailing of personal conflict with external convulsions has often been noted, and is indeed an essential part of the conception. The storm which has broken out in Lear's mind, the result of his treatment at the hands of his children, is admirably fused with the description of the warring elements mainly entrusted to his lips; the external storm, while exercising upon his aged physique the intolerable strain under which it finally breaks, is itself a projection of his inner state, being fused with it as a single poetic reality. D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 1969 ON RELIGIOUS VALUESThe play is not, as some of our grandfathers believed, pessimistic and pagan: it is rather an attempt to provide an answer to the undermining of traditional ideas by the new philosophy that called all in doubt. Shakespeare goes back to a pre-Christian world and builds up from the nature of man himself, and not from revealed religion, those same moral and religious ideals that were being undermined. In a world of lust, cruelty and greed, with extremes of wealth and poverty, man reduced to his essentials needs not wealth, nor power, nor even physical freedom, but rather patience, stoical fortitude, and love; needs perhaps, above all, mutual forgiveness, the exchange of charity, and those sacrifices on which the gods, if there are any gods, throw incense.... Kenneth Muir, 1972 To me, the clairvoyance of King Lear is hardly distinguishable from religious insight. It is not only our profoundest tragedy; it is also our profoundest expression of an essentially Christian comment on man's world and his society, using the terms and benefitting by the formulations of Christian tradition. John Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature, A Study of King Lear, 1964 ON WOMENMen's behavior matters. But women's behavior is of the essence. Cordelia "redeems nature from the general curse/which 'twain' have brought her to" (my italics ['twain']). The twain are, of course, Goneril and Regan. Cordelia redeems nature; Goneril and Regan are responsible for its "curse." In the rhetoric of the play, no male is condemned as Goneril is condemned. A woman who refuses to uphold the inlaw [benevolent] feminine principle completely topples the natural order and plunges the world into chaos. Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience, 1983 ON LANGUAGEThere is, indeed, in King Lear, a kind of irony which is not, to any important extent, to be found in any other play: the irony which lies in the contradiction between the rightness of what is said and the wrongness of its being said by that particular character, or in that particular situation, or in that particular manner. Arthur Small, "Character and Society in Lear," from Shakespeare: The Tragedies, edited by Alfred Harbage, 1964 ADVISORY BOARDWe wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our Book Notes series to meet student needs and critiqued our manuscripts to provide quality materials. Murray Bromberg, Principal Sandra Dunn, English Teacher Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education Frank O'Hare, Professor of English Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts BIBLIOGRAPHYFURTHER READING
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