King Lear Revision

King Lear Revision

1. AO3 Critics

   • Kathleen McLuskie
     • "The play is inherently misogynistic"
   • Coppelia Kahn
     • "Lear goes mad because he is unable to accept his dependance on the feminine"
     • "Women who grow up without a mother take on boystrous tendencies" [Absent Mother]
   • Dollimore
     • "The play is about power, property and inheritance - Lear loses power when he hands over property and status to his daughters"
   • Leonard Tennenhouse
     • "Shakespeare shows dangers of not following patriarchal order"
   • Jan Kott
     • "King Lear is a play about the disintegration of the world"
   • Hal Holbrook
     • "The paranoia of age is stalking him" [Lear]
     • "Lear slips into madness as a direct result of his refusal to face the awful truth that has exploded in his mind"

2. AO4 Context

   • Machiavelli
     • A cunning, opportunistic person
   • The Divine Right of Kings
     • The monarch is subject to no earthly authority, rules directly from God
   • Great Chain of Being
     • A concept in which a religious / social hierachy is established
   • Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortunae)
     • Goddess Fortuna spins the wheel, changing the position of people on the wheel. Whilst some rise, others fall etc.

3. Themes

   • Fathers, Children and Siblings
     • "No, no, no, no. Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in a cage"
   • Authority and Order
   • Old Age
     • "Old fools are babes again"
     • "The Younger rises while the old doth fall"
     • "O sir, you are old"
   • Fooling and Madness
     • "Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind"
   • Disintegration, Chaos, Nothingness
     • "Nothing will come of nothing" - Lear
     • Thou, Nature, art my goddess" - Edmund
     • "The worst is not, so long as we can say "This is the worst""
   • Blindness and Insight
     • "Alack, I have no eyes"
     • "A man may see how this world goes with no eyes"

4. AO3 Productions

   • Helena Kaut-Howson
     • Entire play is portrayed as the hallucination of a mental patient's mind
   • Nahum Tate
     • Changed the text dramatically, bad were punished and good were rewarded
   • The Globe Theatre
     • Cast Joseph Marcell as Lear, first Black Lear