Peripeteia

1. ‘It’s too awful!’
C17th - ‘The Age of Reason’ as exemplified by Samuel Johnson who throws the play away so horrified is he with the treatment of Gloucester and death of Cordelia.

- Shakespeare is considered to be overstepping the bounds of morality, good artistic taste (decorum) and reason.

A similar attitude is revealed by re-writing of ‘King Lear’ with happy ending by Nahum Tate in 1681. Cordelia lives to marry Edgar. Nice. This version of the play becomes the dominant one performed on English stages until well into the Victorian period.

2. ‘It’s awesome!’
C18th - The Romantics’ concept of ‘The Sublime’ means they welcome terror, as well as beauty, embrace extremes of nature, and of human nature, as means of enlarging the soul.

Hazlitt and Coleridge (who lectured on Shakespeare in Bristol) see the play as a linguistic construct to be read, not performed, an epic poem that is essentially unstageable.

3. ‘It’s awful, but psychologically acute’
Early C20th - A.C. Bradley’s lectures on Shakespeare.
Bradley psychologises Aristotle’s approach, reading ‘hamartia’ as psychological flaw. Identifying Lear’s major flaw, Bradley argues the play traces his education and eventual redemption. This reading is character based criticism, with a moral flavour & psychological bent.

[Toe-curlingly, Bradley comments Desdemona, in 'Othello' as a paragon of womanly virtue for being like a ‘dumb creature’. On the other hand, to his credit, Bradley gives short shrift to readings of ‘Othello’ which suggested the moor’s civilisation superficially covers an essential racial barbarity.]

4. ‘It’s awful, but the suffering is redemptive’
The 1930s.
Following Bradley, Christian readings of the play argue that it is a parable of redemption, like the Book of Job. G. Wilson Knight, for example, argues that Lear dies thinking Cordelia is alive, citing this as evidence that he is redeemed by suffering.

5. ‘It’s awful, but so are we’
The 1960s.
Jan Kott in ‘Shakespeare our Contemporary’ reads the play as a bleak existentialist or nihilistic drama, similar to Beckett's 'Endgame'. After the concentration camps of WWII, the violence in the play no longer seems so shocking, improbable or excessive.

1.
Kettle – a Marxist perspective
• ‘On the one hand are those who accept the old order which has to be seen as, broadly speaking, the feudal order; on the other hand are the new people, the individualists (Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall) who have the characteristic outlook of the bourgeoisie.’
• “The ultimate inadequacy of Kent despite his decent, old world virtue, is one of the expressions in the play of the impossibility of a return of the feudal past.”
• Lear’s story is a “story of his progress from being a king to being a man, neither more nor less” 9. Contemporary critics Cambridge guide: “In modern criticism, the origins of tragedy lie in identifiable social causes, and are capable of being resisted.”

2. Modern criticism
Kathleen McLuskie
• ‘In ‘King Lear’...the narrative and its dramatisation present a connection between sexual insubordination and anarchy, and the connection is given an explicitly misogynistic emphasis’
• ‘The representation of patriarchal misogyny is most obvious in the treatment of Goneril and Regan’
• ‘Patriarchy, the institution of male power in the family and the State, is seen as the only form of social organisation strong enough to hold chaos at bay...’
• The action of the play depends “upon an audience accepting an equation between ‘human nature’ and male power”.
• “Family relations in this play are seen as fixed and determined, and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of rightful order.”
• “Goneril and Regan’s treatment of their father… is seen not simply as cruel and selfish but as a fundamental violation of human nature”.
• “women’s lust is vividly represented as the centre and source of the ensuing corruption”. • “a rupture of ‘Propinquity and property of blood’ is tantamount to the destructive of nature itself”.
• “the misogyny of King Lear, both the play and its hero, is constructed out of an ascetic tradition which presents women as the source of the primal sin of lust, combining with concerns about the threat to the family posed by female insubordination.”
• Cordelia’s saving love “works less as a redemption of womankind than as an example of patriarchy restored.”

Jonathan Dollimore
• “King Lear is above all a play about power, property and inheritance.”
• Shakespeare investigates what happens when there is a “catastrophic redistribution of power”
• “What makes Lear the person he is, is not kingly essence (divine right), but, among other things, his authority and his family.”
• Society is “torn apart by conflict” because of its “faulty ideological structure”.
• On Edmund: ‘the Jacobean malcontent...is not the antithesis of social processes but its focus...the focus of political, social and ideological contradiction’.

R. A. Foakes:
• The final speech is better placed in Edgar’s mouth than Albany’s as it rounds off ‘the enhancement of Edgar’s role’