Neil Bowen on (Edited )
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.