KING LEAR: AN ADVANCED STUDY

KING LEAR: AN ADVANCED STUDY



The article intends to bring together a representative selection of the most useful criticism available upon Shakespeare's King Lear.

Coleridge called King Lear ' the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare the poet'

The tragedy, derived from the legend of Leir of Britain(a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king), tells the tale of a king who decides to hand down his land and power to his three daughters. The third daughter failing to flatter the King gets nothing while the other two are showered with her half for fawning. 
Now, the two daughters upon having wealth and power make the furious old man stripped of titles wake up to the painful realisation of false love and respect. This makes Lear reconcile with his third daughter before she tragically passes away. 


A.D Nuttall observes that Shakespearean representation allows us to see aspects of reality we would not otherwise recognise.

Harold Bloom goes beyond Nuttall to suggest that Shakespeare moulded both our sense of reality and our cognitive mode of apprehending reality to a far greater degree than Homer or Plato, Montaigne or Nietzsche, Freud or Proust. 

He even goes to say that only the Bible rivals Shakespeare as an influence upon our sense of how human character, thinking, personality, ought to be imitated by language. He adds that the true precursor of Shakespeare is not Marlowe but the Bible. 

According to John Holloway and Frank Kermode, King Lear as tragedy finds its worthy forerunner in the  Book of Job.

Kenneth Muir observes that " at times Lear's voice seems to blend with that of Job..."

Jan Kott called King Lear a ' new Book of Job.'

The play convinces us to compare the sufferings of Job and Lear. Thrown out from being a king to a fugitive in the open, assailed by the by merciless weather and betrayed by ungrateful daughters, is indeed an unpleasant fate. But is it truly Jobean? Job, after all, has experienced much more dreadful - his sons, daughters, servants, sheep, camels and houses all have been destroyed by the Satanic fires. His physical torment far transcends Lear's. 
 
Imagery that associates humans with worms, and with dust is present in both works. Job is a righteous man handed over to the demonic fate, but Lear is a self-absorbed king whose suffering to a considerable degree is brought upon by himself. It is Shakespeare's genius that accords Lear's suffering Jobean dignity and grandeur.

Milton remarked that the Book Of Job was the rightful model for a "brief epic", such as " Paradise Regained", but in what sense can it be the appropriate model for tragedy? 

Lear goes into the storm scene on the heath screaming in anger and comes out with crucial change deeply in process within him. He is full of paternal love for the Fool and concern for Poor Tom. This is a remarkable instance of human transformation anywhere in literature. 

Shakespeare's imagination may have been inspired by the Bible in drawing the parallel where Job ultimately receives the reward of his virtue, but Lear purified and elevated sufferers instead. He witnesses the horror of Cordelia's murder. Now, here Book of Job emphasises the absolute negativity of Lear's tragedy. 

THE LIST OF CRITICAL ESSAYS

1) Harold C. Goddard's  King Lear, is a luminous reading in Shakespeare criticism.

2) Michael J. Warren's Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar  - The essay contrasts the different Quarto and Folio texts and the problem it raises in the interpretation.

3) Stephen Booth's On the Greatness of King Lear address the greatness of the play.

4) John Dollimore's King Lear and Essentialist Humanism sets forth a materialist reading of King Lear and reminds us that the play is about power, property and inheritance

5) Marianne Novy's Patriarchy, Mutuality, and Forgiveness in King Lear is an effective feminist discussion of the perils of patriarchy as depicted in the drama. 

6) Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare and the Exorcist is a New Historicist reading. It relates King Lear to an account of spectacular exorcisms carried out by the outlaw Catholic priests in the England of 1585-86

7) James L. Calderwood's Creative Uncreation in King Lear is a deconstruction of the dialectics of creation and uncreation in the play. 


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