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Is King Lear an Antiauthoritarian Play?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Extract
MOST modern criticism of King Lear directs itself resolutely against the notion, said to be held by some critics, that the play forms part of the Christian tradition, that it ultimately affirms the victory of good over evil, specifically, the victory of love over hate, and that it therefore makes virtue prevail in the end.1 On the contrary, Dr. Johnson felt that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice” (“Notes” to King Lear), and the majority of modern critics holds, as Swinburne did,2 that the play is deeply pessimistic, that in writing King Lear Shakespeare deliberately examined such Christian concepts as divine providence, retributive justice, or the existence of some universal moral order, and came to the conclusion that at best man's world was a “great stage of fools” (iv.vi.182), whose false sense of security should make the philosopher chuckle; or that at worst it was a “wheel of fire” (iv.vii.47) upon which not only Lear but every man is bound, an image that should make the poet cry in agony.3
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973
References
1 For a list of critics who regard King Lear as a “Christian” play see William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), pp. 3–8; Barbara Everett, “The New King Lear,” CritQ, 2 (1960), 325–39 ; for some interesting replies to this article see also the two subsequent issues of Critical Quarterly; Roland M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 19–42.
2 A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), pp. 170–76. Opinions expressed at the following places are representative of the “pessimistic” view of the play: Everett; Sears Jayne, “Charity in King Lear,” SQ, 15 (1964), 277–88; Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 87–124; Robert K. Presson, “Boethius, King Lear' and Maystresse Philosophie,” JEGP, 64 (1965), 406–24; John D. Rosenberg, “King Lear and His Comforters,” Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 135–46; Minas Sawas, “King Lear as a Play of Divine Justice,” CE, 27 (1966), 560–62; Betty Kantor Stuart, “Truth and Tragedy in King Lear,” SQ, 18 (1967), 167–80.
3 Citations from King Lear in my essay are to George Lyman Kittredge's edition of the play, revised by Irving Ribner, The Kittredge Shakespeares (Waltham, Mass.; Ginn-Blaisdell, 1967).
4 “Totem and Taboo,” The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. Abraham Arden Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 922.
5 John Ayre, éd., The Catechism of Thomas Becon, with Other Pieces (Cambridge: The University Press, 1844), pp.86–87.
6 “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 66. See also Elton, pp. 75–84; August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (1846; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), p. 413; Levin Ludwig Schucking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (London: Harrap, 1922), p. 179; Hildegard Schumann, “Konig Lear,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch (Weimar), 100/101 (1964–65), 193; Stuart, p. 171.
7 Shakespearean Tragedy (1905; rpt. Greenwich, Conn.:Fawcett, 1966), pp. 266–67.
8 Prefaces to Shakespeare, ed. Muriel St. Clare Byrne (1946; rpt. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), ii, 43.
9 Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (New York: Dutton, 1960), i, 54; Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Dent, 1906), p. 119; Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 173. Others include Robert B. Heilman, This Great Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 35–36; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy: With Three New Essays, 4th rev. and enl. ed. (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 198; Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare: The Great Tragedies (London: Longmans, 1961), p. 29. For some German theories regarding Cordelia's “pride” see Horace H. Furness, ed., King Lear, New Variorum Ed. (1880; rpt. New York: American Scholar Publications, 1965), pp. 449–65.
10 John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of 'King Lear (London: Faber, 1949), p. 117.
11 I cannot agree with Robert H. West that the play takes the obligation of children “to love and to revere their parents for granted,” that this much “is a given morality in the action.” In the most startling scene, the one that sets the events of the tragedy in motion, Cordelia's action, whatever her motive, cannot be said to be dictated by love, for charity “Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” (i Cor. xiii.7). And Cordelia clearly has the author's and the audience's sympathy. See “Sex and Pessimism in King Lear,” SQ, 11 (1960), 55–60.
12 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (1934; rpt. New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1958), pp. 14–15. See also Kenneth Muir, éd., Arden Ed. of King Lear (London: Methuen, 1952), p. iii.
13 Danby emphasizes the importance of the study of “allegorical levels of meaning” for Shakespeare criticism. See Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature, pp. 121–25.
14 Principles of Shakespearean Production (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1936), p. 231. But see also Knight's defense against Roland M. Frye's charge of Christian bias in Shakespeare and Religion: Essays of Forty Years (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), esp. p.297.
15 Novalis: Schriften, ed. J. Minor (Jena: Diederichs, 1907), “Fragment 213,” iii, 42–43.
16 For an analysis of Lear's development as a tragic hero see J. Stampfer, “The Catharsis of King Lear,” SS, 13 (1960), 1–10.
17 King Lear: A Tragic Reading of Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1949), p. 96.
18 See John Shaw, “King Lear: The Final Lines,” Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 261–67.
19 Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 105 ; Nicholas Brooke puts it similarly: “We are left with unaccommodated man indeed; naked, unsheltered by any consolation whatsoever,” Shakespeare: King Lear (London: Arnold, 1963), p. 60.
20 Cf. Brooke, p. 60: “Our feelings, crushed by facing ultimate negation, are simultaneously channelled towards recognizing the perpetual vitality of the most vulnerable virtues.” Also Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles : Univ. of California Press, 1965), p. 117: The play “begs us to seek the meaning of our human fate not in what becomes of us, but in what we become.”
See also “Sex and Pessimism in King Lear” p. 60.
21 William Blake. “London.”