"No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear"
1 of 27
G. Wilson Knight
"Apart from Lear... and Gloucester, his shadow, the subsidiary dramatic persons fall naturally into two parties, good and bad... The exact balance is curious"
2 of 27
G. Wilson Knight
"none are wholly good or bad, excepting perhaps Cordelia and Cornwall."
3 of 27
A.C. Bradley
"We have long regarded him [Lear] not only as 'a man more sinned against than sinning', but almost wholly as a sufferer"
4 of 27
Stephen Greenblatt
"King Lear depicts something very much like such a world turned upside down"
5 of 27
G. Wilson Knight
"This recurring and vivid stress on the incongruous and the fantastic is not a subsidiary element in King Lear: it is the very heart of the play."
6 of 27
G. Wilson Knight
"nearly all the persons suffer some form of crude indignity in the course of the play"
7 of 27
Kiernan Ryan
"King Lear wrests itself free of the presiding ideologies at war within its world, aligning itself instead with the mad, the blind, the beggared, the speechless, the powerless, the worthless"
8 of 27
Frank Kermode
"'the worst is not/ So long as we can say, This is the worst'. This might be the motto of the play, an unrelenting study in protraction; patience... is defeated by fortune, by nature, by the indifference of heaven to justice."
9 of 27
Kathleen McLuskie
"The close links between misogyny and patriarchy define the women in the play"
10 of 27
Kathleen McLuskie
"Cordelia's saving love, so admired by critics, works in the action less as redemption for womankind than as an example of patriarchy restored."
11 of 27
Samuel Johnson
"A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life"
12 of 27
Knights
"This play is a microcosm of the human race"
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Speaight
"Shakespeare found Lear buried deep in popular legend, but a folk story is not necessarily a fantasy. A fairy story... generally points a moral and suggests a Utopia... Lear [doesn't] deny Utopia [nor is it around the corner]"
14 of 27
Draper
"chaos from conflict of authority is the very essence of the play"
15 of 27
Taylor
"a man who grossly overvalues material things"
16 of 27
Spencer
"blind indifference to the suffering of others who lack the bare necessities of life"
17 of 27
Knights
"King Lear is the decay and fall of the world"
18 of 27
Frank Kermode
"one lives in ceremony... regalia which set him above nature. The other is born naked... Lear is stripped"
19 of 27
A.C. Bradley
"this fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing, continues almost to the end. It is otherwise in King Lear"
20 of 27
Frank Kermode
"The love [Lear] seeks is not the sort that can be offered in formal...expressions... rejects love of Cordelia and Kent"
21 of 27
Freud (application only)
Lear= ID Kent=Ego Fool= Superego Cordelia= Goddess of death
22 of 27
Fitzpatrick (application only)
Lear has dementia- hysterical, angry, short term memory loss, has trouble recognising Cordelia in 4.7 and hallucinates in final scene.
23 of 27
Coppelia Kahn
"Lear's desire to be mothered by Cordelia"
24 of 27
Coppelia Kahn (application only)
'The Absent Mother'; Lear's journey from misogynist to accepting womanly qualities; sees the womb as a sign of weakness; "Hysterico Passion!"= hyster is a disease of the womb which reflects women's place in society
25 of 27
French/Bamber (application only)
Lear presents feminism as a set of social attitudes rather than a project for social change; sympathetic to the difficulties of women (doesn't account for historical circumstance)
26 of 27
Kathleen McLuskie (application only)
'The Patriarchal Bad'; King Lear as a misogynistic play; model for sexual politics of its genre and history; protagonists in tragedies are always male; all female resistance is defined by fixed gender, position and sexuality in the family
27 of 27
Other cards in this set
Card 2
Front
"Apart from Lear... and Gloucester, his shadow, the subsidiary dramatic persons fall naturally into two parties, good and bad... The exact balance is curious"
Back
G. Wilson Knight
Card 3
Front
"none are wholly good or bad, excepting perhaps Cordelia and Cornwall."
Back
Card 4
Front
"We have long regarded him [Lear] not only as 'a man more sinned against than sinning', but almost wholly as a sufferer"
Back
Card 5
Front
"King Lear depicts something very much like such a world turned upside down"
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