King Lear Critic Quotations

King Lear Critic Quotations

1. Frank Kermode

   • "Clothes are emblems of pride and wickedness to natural man."
   • "Edmund evokes nature as his goddess, a goddess who despises such human, social contrivances as primogeniture."
   • "The play develops a language of folly and madness, to be heard in counterpart with the language of evil that remains horribly sane."
   • "King Lear is about suffering represented as a condition of the world as we inherit it or make it for ourselves."

2. Key

   • Clothing
   • Nature
   • Madness
   • Order
   • Blindness
   • Women
   • Family
   • Justice

3. Sarah Doncaster

   • "Shakespeare belonged to a world where notions of man, his nature and his place in the universe were an amalgamation of both Christian and pagan philosophies."
   • "in order to overcome any debate on Kingship regarding legitimacy or efficiency the representation of unity and harmony between the state and Nature was of paramount importance to his continued reign."

4. Uncredited

   • "Shakespeare develops the theme that self-knowledge derives from inner reflection."

5. Janet Adelman

   • "In discovering what he is father to, he must confront the implications of his own flawed paternity."
   • "[Women] are characterised as monstrous and increasingly identified as a source of evil, finally removed from the realm of human sympathy"
   • "The storm functions as a place in which Lear remembers his origins."

6. Trevor Nunn

   • "When everything in our history tells us to believe the gods will intervene on the side of virtue, Shakespeare says they don't."
   • "Shakespeare ... violate[s] ... a fundamental rule of drama that plays serve as a moral or cautionary influence on us, because they show ... that the good will triumph by the end of the story."

7. William R Elton

   • "[Shatters] the foundations of faith itself."

8. AC Bradley

   • "a sense of law and beauty ... and a consciousness of greatness and pain."

9. Victor Kiernan

   • "Shakespeare leaves us to hope the masses will stand up for themselves."

10. Jan Kott

    • "all bonds, all laws, whether divine, natural or human, are broken ... social order will crumble into dust."