critics

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[Adelman

points out that whenever Lear wants to reject or deny

something, he tries to associate it with the (absent) female/mother. He even tries to blame Gloucester’s plight on daughters,

when, as Kent points out, he has none].

Janet

Adelman

2006

[The

play] …embraces Lear’s vision of them [Gonerill and Regan], making them as

monstrous as he himself could have wished: as it progresses, they are increasingly identified as the source of evil;

finally removed wholly from the realm of human sympathy – as Edmund never is – they die as

monsters, consumed by their own excess.

Janet

Adelman

2006

…by

definition, his [Lear's] daughters disrupt the

patriarchal ideal, both insofar as they disrupt

the transmission of property from father to son and insofar as they disrupt

the paternal fantasy of self-replication.

Janet

Adelman

2006

…the motherlessness of Lear's world…

[This particularly interesting in the light of the fact that one of the

story’s sources, The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, begins with the

king’s dismay at losing his wife, and this grief provides motive for his

abdication of responsibility for the kingdom.]

Janet

Adelman

2006

[On

originality, and Shakespeare's use of sources] …where we value originality

and consider it as diametrically opposed to the imitation of previous autors

and texts, Renaissance critics seem to value imitation

about originality, or rather as a route to originality.

Gavin

Alexander

2004

…as though the foot must judge the head…

Homily against Disobedience and

Wilful Rebellion

Anon

1570

Is not rebellion the greatest of all mischiefs?

Anon

1570

The

proper pleasure of tragedy…

[moves] through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions.

Aristotle

0 335 BC

[about

the ending] ...part of its power comes from the knowledge thatLear dies in a

moment of utter self-deception. There is no anagnorisis

or revelation, no coming to a new understanding of

reality, which is so often how the tragic is softened for us. Lear has learned nothing.

Annabel

Beer

2007

The

ending of King Lear is

intolerable, and it is important that it is intolerable.

Annabel

Beer

2007

[Reviewing

a performance of King Lear at

the RSC, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellan] …by his own disrobing, Lear acknowledges he is a member of the

human race.

Michael

Billington

2007

[Reviewing

a performance of King Lear at the RSC, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellan]

By the end you feel this is a Lear who has somehow

undergone a rigorous moral education.

Michael

Billington

2007

[Reviewing

a performance of King Lear at

the RSC, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Ian McKellan] …McKellan reads a

prepared speech, announcing that he will

'unburdened crawl towards death' with a wry

chuckle: obviously, he intends the exact

opposite.

Michael

Billington

2007

...the

only figures who survive to emphasize the sterility of

the final tableau are Albany, a widower, and

Edgar, an unmarried son.

Lynda E.

Boose

1982

[In Elizabethan/Jacobean Society] Parent-child bonds were in general remote and formal, singularly lacking in affective bonds…

Lynda E.

Boose

1982

[In the

Reanaissance…] Women are often given the same advice that is given to

servants … Chastity, piety, obedience, and humility are

the virtues that are stressed.

Diane

Bornstein

1978

[King Lear is] …Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his

best play. …When I regard it strictly as drama, it

appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a

whole to Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth.

A. C.

Bradley

1904

[On

setting] ...the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place…

A. C.

Bradley

1904

…there is something in its very essence which is at war with the

senses, and demands a purely imaginative realization.

A. C.

Bradley

1904

So what

does Shakespeare say? What is he trying to teach us? … Wisely, Shakespeare

refuses to answer.

Peter

Brook

1968

[On Edmund] He is clearly a villain, whatever our standards... yet if we look at our first impression of him in the early

scenes, we find he is by far the most attractive

character we meet.

Peter

Brook

1968

…a play which refuses all moralizing... designed to study the

power and emptiness of nothing…

Peter

Brook

1968

Shakespeare is a model of theatre

that contains Brecht and Beckett, but goes beyond

both.

Peter

Brook

1968

The

meaning will be for the moment of the performance.

Peter

Brook

1968

...they

[bastards] have a clear motive to contest the dominant

ideology [of legitimate aristocratic inheritance].

Susan

Bruce

2013

[Edmund's

perspective] …shares more with the perspective of an

emergent bourgeosie than with that of the

aristocracy

Susan

Bruce

2013

[Primogeniture

depends on the belief that] …the pure-blooded aristocrat

is more beautiful, more clever, more good, and,

well, just more pure, than those base-born, or born out of wedlock.

Susan

Bruce

2013

…we sympathise with Edmund's sense of injustice.

Susan

Bruce

2013

Bastards are evil in Renaissance drama…

Susan

Bruce

2013

Nature is an extraordinarily complex concept in King Lear.

Susan

Bruce

2013

Primogenture

seeks to keep property under the control of a tiny number of people (the

aristocracy)…

Susan

Bruce

2013

[Cavell

suggests the opening scene in which Lear requires his daughters to profess

their love is a contrived affair on his part – he expects

and requires only a public expression of love

which need not, indeed must not, be sincere, because only insincere love can

be paid for with land. It is a scene of courtly display, for the benefit of

courtiers and kingdom, but Cordelia disrupts Lear’s plan precisely because

her love is inconveniently genuine – it makes a claim on him he cannot pay

for in land].

Stanley

Cavell

2002

In King Lear action and imagery appear to be particularly

closely dependent upon each other and are reciprocally illuminating.

Wolfgang

Clemen

1977

[The

'orthodox' view of Nature is held by...] ...those in the play who seem

already to be slightly old-fashioned, but who are

nevertheless unquestionably the most human.

John F.

Danby

1949

The idea

of Nature… is always something normative for human

beings…

John F.

Danby

1949

...whatsoever

is beyond the compasse of custome, wee deeme likewise to bee beyond

the compasse of reason, God knowes for the most

part, unreasonably…

Michel

de Montaigne

1603

Justice…is

too important to be trusted to empathy.

Jonathan

Dollimore

1984

Lear identifies with suffering… at the point where he is

powerless to do anything about it.

Jonathan

Dollimore

1984

[King Lear is] a play about power, property and inheritance.

Jonathan

Dollimore

1984

…a catastrophic redistribution of power and property.

Jonathan

Dollimore

1984

Goveril's

'all' and Regan's 'more' can only be trumped by Cordelia's 'nothing'… where 'all' has been so radically devalued, Cordelia's

muttered 'Nothing' is the only sound currency.

Terry

Eagleton

1986

The

paradox which King Lear explores is that it is ‘natural’

for the human animal to transcend its own limits, yet this creative tendency

to exceed oneself is also the source of destructiveness.

Terry

Eagleton

1986

[Lear

has the] unique distinction among tragic heroes… that hedies pointing away

from himself, at somebody else.

Ewan

Fernie

Bastards

were dispossessed of legal identity and lack of family

name excluded them from any right to inherit.

Alison

Findlay

1994

The

disadvantages suffered by bastards… were similar to those endured by women, their fellow representatives of the 'other'…

Alison

Findlay

1994

[Foakes

notes a shift in the reputations of Hamlet and King Lear in the 1950s-1960s, Lear becoming the more frequently described as Shakespeare’s

‘greatest’ work after this time. He suggests a

link between this shift and the dark uncertainties of the mid-twentieth

century, particularly the threat of nuclear war]

R. A.

Foakes

1993

[Lear] …wishes to be the object – the preferred and even the sole

recipient – of his child’s love.

Stephen

Greenblatt

1982

...the dread, particularly in a gerontological hierarchy… of being

supplanted by the young.

Stephen

Greenblatt

1990

…parents facing retirement turned, not surprisingly, to the law, obtaining contracts or maintenance agreements…

Stephen

Greenblatt

1990

[King

Lear is] ...the greatest

metaphysical poem in the English language.

Germaine

Greer

2008

[Applicable

to Edmund?] …the malcontent is a man divided within

himself… On the one hand he is a blunt moralist… On the other, he particpates in the visciousness and

self-seeking of the world…

David

Gunby

1971

Lear's failure to see is wilful in the extreme. It is not only that he lacks foresight and cannot see people

clearly or assess their motives accurately; he will not.

Jay L.

Halio

1992

…his

[the Fool's] characteristic idiom suggests that he is a

'natural' fool, not an 'artificial' one, though

his perceptiveness and wit show that he is far from being an idiot or a

moron, however 'touched' he may otherwise be.

Jay L.

Halio

1992

[In King Lear]

'Nature', 'natural', and 'unnatural' recur again and again with every shade

of meaning and understanding.

G. B.

Harrison

1968

To

Edmund… Nature is the goddess of the wild; he is

'natural' man because he is by nature a beast.

G. B.

Harrison

1968

To the

old fathers nature is the goddess of natural affection by whose law children

are naturally loyal to their parents.

G. B.

Harrison

1968

[On

Cordelia's response to the 'love test'] …her direct rejection of the whole immoral nature of love as an expressible 'value.'

Terence

Hawkes

1959

It is

his [Lear's] rash haste, his

violent impetuosity,

his blindness to

everything but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all

his misfortunes, that aggravates his impatience of them, that enforces our pity for him.

William

Hazlitt

1838

The mind

of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried

movements of passion, is like a tall ship driven about by

the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the

storm…

William

Hazlitt

1838

[describing

Edmund, and reasons for liking him] …careless,

light-hearted villainy…

William

Hazlitt

1817

It is the absence of this detestable quality [hypocrisy] that is the only relief in the character of Edmund the

Bastard, and that at times reconciles us to him.

William

Hazlitt

1817

The

blind man sees because he can have insight into the divine reality. The

sanity of the mad is that they can understand eternal truth.

Robert

Heilman

1948

Tragedy records, eventually, victory rather than defeat; it asserts the authority of the

spiritual scheme of things… and it presents man…

undergoing a spiritual rehabilitation, recovering the insights by which he

may endure. The suffering in tragedy is not an end, but a product and a

means; through it comes wisdom and, if not redemption, at least a renewed

grasp upon the laws of redemption.

Robert

Heilman

1948

By

expiatory suffering, [Lear] undergoes a spiritual recovery, an imaginative

wakening…

Robert B.

Heilman

1963

[The

cause of] disaster [is] …the horror of a society divided

between extremes of rich and poor, greed and

starvation, the powerful and the powerless, robes and rags.... Lear himself, like the faithful Gloucester, discovers this only

when his own world is turned upside down…

Margot

Heinemann

1991

[Heinemann links scenes of flattery and favour in King Lear to

the court of King James I in 1604-7. This context,

Heinemann argues, affects audience interpretations of Cordelia and Kent’s

refusal to participate in this insincere and corrupt courtly behaviour].

Margot

Heinemann

1991

[Shakespeare's

plays] …present images of kings and queens, statesmen and counsellors as simultaneously holders of sacred office and fallible human

beings who may be weak, stupid, greedy or cruel…

Margot

Heinemann

1991

…Cordelia, who challenges her father’s use of absolute power,

retains the audience’s sympathy in so doing. To read the play as unequivocally patriarchalist is to read

against the grain.

Margot

Heinemann

1991

King Lear is very much a political

play – that is, a play concerned with power and

government in the state, with public and civil life, and not solely with private relationships and passions.

Margot

Heinemann

1991

…during

the time men live without a common power to keep them all

in awe, they are in that condition which is called

war… and the life of man [is] solitary, poor,

nasty, brutish and short.

Thomas

Hobbes

1651

[On

women] …within the tightly knit Renaissance household the

wife's tongue is her only weapon.

Lisa

Jardine

1983

Both gossiping and scolding give her [the Renaissance wife] a

semblance of power, which threatens disorder without actually freeing her from

her multiple obligations and constraints.

Lisa

Jardine

1983

…I am

not able to apologise… for the extrusion of Gloucester’s

eyes, which seems an act too horrid to be endured in

dramatic exhibition…

Samuel

Johnson

1765

…Shakespeare

has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the

reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles

Samuel

Johnson

1765

There is

perhaps no play which keeps the attentions so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests and curiosity.

Samuel

Johnson

1765

The

malcontent… is a character who specifically represents the political

disaffection of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century…

James R.

Keller Princes

1993

…Lear is

the story of how a king becomes a man…

Arnold

Kettle

1964

[As in Hamlet…] …the

protagonist has been defeated, not by his enemies or by his weaknesses but by

history.

Arnold

Kettle

1964

[On Edmund] He is the new man of the

incipient bourgeois revolution, the private enterprise man… the individual go-getter, the machiavel… man with the lid off.

Arnold

Kettle

1964

[On Goneril and Regan: These characters

offer…] …a modern-sounding contempt for the

hierarchical principle… …a terrible

common-sense effectiveness…

…heartless rationalisation…

Arnold

Kettle

1964

On the one hand are those who accept

the old order (Lear, Gloucester, Kent Albany) which has to be seen as,

broadly speaking, the feudal order; on the other hand are the new

people, the individualists (Goneril, Regan,

Edmund, Cornwall) who have the characteristic outlook of the bourgoisie.

Arnold

Kettle

1964

Shakespeare

reveals, from the very start, a society in turmoil…

Arnold

Kettle

1964

Tom is a

richer character than Edgar

because he includes Edgar, whereas Edgar doesn’t include Tom. Edgar is not really changed by being Tom…

Arnold

Kettle

1964

...a masculine identity crisis in a

culture that dichotomised power as masculine and

feeling as feminine...

Coppélia

Khan

1986

He

[Lear] wants two mutually exclusive things at once: to

have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely

dependent on them.

Coppélia

Khan

1986

I

believe that Lear’s madness is essentially his rage at being deprived of the

maternal presence.

Coppélia

Khan

1986

The only source of love, power, and authority is the father

figure – an awesome, demanding presence. But what

the play depicts, of course, is the failure of that presence…

Coppélia

Khan

1986

…the failure of a father's power to command love in a

patriarchal world…

Coppélia

Khan

2003

In this

patriarchal world, masculine identity depends upon

repressing the vulnerability, dependency and capacity for feeling which are

called 'feminine'

Coppélia

Khan

2003

When

Lear begins to feel the loss of Cordelia, to be wounded by her sisters, and

to recognize his own vulnerability, he calls his state of

mind hysteria, 'the mother'.

Coppélia

Khan

2003

Demonic laughter echoes in the Lear universe… Thence arises its particular tension of pain...

Wilson

Knight

1949

…there

is a humour that treads the brink of tears…

Wilson

Knight

1949

He does

not see or understand anything… Lear is ridiculous, naïve and stupid.

Jan

Kott

1963

He [The Fool] sees brute force, cruelty

and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or

supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward

of good.

Jan

Kott

1974

In a

tragic and grotesque world, situations are imposed, compulsory and

inescapable… the tragic hero and grotesque actor must always lose their

struggle…

Jan

Kott

1964

[Discussing

the ending of Peter Brook’s stage production of Lear] A brother throws over

his shoulder the body of the brother he has killed. This

is all there is. There will not be another king. The stage remains empty.

Like the world.

Jan

Kott

1964

[Discussing,

specifically, presentations of Lear in Victorian theatre] When realistically treated, Lear and

Gloster were too ridiculous to appear tragic heroes.

Jan

Kott

1964

…disintegration… …Beckett in Shakespeare…

Jan

Kott

1964

King

Lear gives one the impression of a high mountain that

everyone admires, yet no one particularly wishes to climb.

Jan

Kott

1964

[In the mid twentieth-century…] …established values have been overthrown, and there is no appeal to God, nature, or History, from the

tortures inflicted by the cruel world…

Jan

Kott

1974

The Fool

knows that the only true madness is to regard this world

as rational.

Jan

Kott

1974

…the Fool does not desert his

ridiculous degraded king, but follows him into

madness.

Jan

Kott

1974

But

unlike the Histories and the tragedies, in King Lear the world is not healed

again…

Jan

Kott

1974

He [Lear] believed that a king could not cease to be a king, just as the sun could not cease to shine.

Jan

Kott

1974

In King Lear it is the Fool who deprives majesty of its sacredness…

Jan

Kott

1974

Lear

divided his kingdom and gave away his power, but wanted

to remain a king.

Jan

Kott

1974

The

cathartic principle itself, in maintaining that pity and fear are not merely

to be aroused but to be purged, is evidence of the need in tragedy to have

dissonance exploded, leaving only the serenity of harmony behind.

Murray

Krieger

1958

…by nature Chyldren are the fortresse and defence of their

Parents…

Thomas

Kyd

1588

[Criticising

Tate's revised ending of the play] …as if at his years,

and with his experience, any thing was left but to die,

Charles

Lamb

1810

[When we

read King

Lear (as opposed to seeing it on stage)] …we see not Lear, but we are Lear, -

we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice

of daughters and storms…

Charles

Lamb

1818

Lear is

essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.

Charles

Lamb

1818

Anagnorisis in King Lear is political and revolutionary.

Lear recognises that his destruction was produced by the kind of society over which he presided. The tragedy is that only through violent destruction can the

nature of that unjust society be revealed. But once its nature is understood

there is the potential for change.

Sean

McAvoy

2009

misogyny… in his [Lear's] speeches

about his daughters, and in the apparent

stereotyping of… three females into either lustful harridans or chaste and

virtuous daughter.

Sean

McAvoy

2009

One of

the most notable features of the play is its absence of

mothers.

Sean

McAvoy

2009

[On

reasons for deploying poetry or prose] …many of Shakespeare's most startling

effects derive from his productive breaking of rules…

Russ

McDonald

2004

From

about 1595… Shakespeare begins to devise his own rules

for appropriate speech.

Russ

McDonald

2004

In King Lear … the narrative and its

dramatisation present a connection between sexual

insubordination and anarchy, and the connection is

given an explicitly misogynist emphasis.

Kathleen

McLuskie

1985

[On

Edgar] The various roles he plays are the means by which

he matures into royalty.

Kenneth

Muir

1986

[In King

Lear] ...Shakespeare certainly is enquiring into human

nature…

Trevor

Nunn, interviewed by J. Bate

2007

…an atheistical Edmund creating mayhem in his world, leads people

to beg the gods to intervene, almost obsessively.

Trevor

Nunn, interviewed by J. Bate

2007

The

moment of Lear's awakening [Act 4 Scene 6] is one of the

most moving scenes in our literature, coming as it

does after so much grotesque and senseless horror…

Joyce Carol

Oates

1974

[The

Fool represents] ...worldly common sense…

George

Orwell

1966

[Of the

Fool's jokes, riddles and rhymes] …a trickle of sanity…

George

Orwell

1966

Lear

[is] blinded by his obsession with the quantity of

things…

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

…his suffering is so much out of proportion with his flaw…

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

Dead, she [Cordelia] becomes a powerful figure again, with the emotions to move both Lear and the audience…

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

The

injustice of King Lear has

annoyed many critics.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

[King

Lear is about] …the world turned upside down…

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

[When]

he declares that 'Nothing will come of nothing'… He could

not, as he will learn, be more wrong.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

…all

through the years before and after the writing of King

Lear there was a stream of … poor prophets

threatening the end of the world unless the social order was changed and

justice given to the poor.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

…clash of two different ways of thinking, one feudal and one

modern…

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

…it is

precisely as nothing, as an absence, that she [Cordelia] is most

powerful in the play.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

…the ending of the play is in a sense a second ending. We have already had a conventional, moral ending, the

provided by the single combat of Edmund and Edgar.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

Conventional

complaints about the ending of the play - that there is no convincing

re-assertion of the moral and social order at the end - forget that this is precisely the effect that Shakespeare structured the

play to achieve.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

Duty and bonds are the values of a feudal society, 'how much?' is the basic question of a capitalist one.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

If ever

there were two opposing views of the world that are tearing the universe

apart, it is in King Lear.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

In the battle between order and power, between feudal system and individual will…basic categories and fundamental oppositions fall apart.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

It [King Lear] has no moral lesson.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

When he [Lear]…recognises that wealth and power have no real meaning, then he is able to find Cordelia again.

Fintan

O'Toole

2002

King Lear...comes perilously close to presenting a fictional portrait of the king

[James I] himself...

Annabel

Patterson

1989

[Paraphrasing

The Prince, a controversial

political treatise written by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1520] …there is no

reality but power, and power is the reward of

ruthlessness, ferocity and cunning.

J. H.

Plumb, paraphrasing Machiavelli

1961

[Paraphrasing

The Prince, a controversial

political treatise written by Niccolò Machiavelli in 1520] The Prince lays it

down that men in general are selfish, treacherous,

cowardly, greedy, and above all, gullible and stupid.

J. H.

Plumb, paraphrasing Machiavelli

1961

[With

the addition of the subplot…]

Lear's world becomes the entire world, and it becomes clear that the fate

of Lear may be the fate of any man.

Irving

Ribner

1952

[Rosinger

suggests that the play is about Lear and Gloucester's self-discovery after a

period of treating others as a means of self-gratification].

Lawrence

Rosinger

1968

[King Lear...] …subjects an

all-powerful, patriarchal monarch to a traumatic experience whose

consequences throw into question kingship as such

and the unequal distribution of wealth and power on which it is predicated.

Kiernan

Ryan

1989

…there is no consolation, no paradoxical moral triumph in which

to take comfort or find compensation.

Kiernan

Ryan

1989

It [the

play] leaves us no choice but to identify the problem as

the indefensible subjection of men and women to the injustices of a

stratified society…

Kiernan

Ryan

1989

[On

Shakespeare’s tragic heroes] …they are all hoodwinked by history: overpowered by the prevailing social and ideological tides which sweep them unawares out of their depth, rather than some

metaphysically predestined misfortune or by some flaw…

Kiernan

Ryan

1989

…what

happens in these plays is the result of a specific

constellation of particular conditions and pressures…

Kiernan

Ryan

1989

Far from condoning patriarchal conceptions of gender King Lear exposes their collusion in

the tragedy and portrays men moving beyond them.

Kiernan

Ryan

2005

The

principle of health - grace - is not in heaven, but in nature, and especially

in human nature, and it cannot finally be rooted out. …[There is] a faith in a universal moral order which cannot be finally defeated.

Wilbur

Sanders

1968

After

surviving so many sufferings, Lear can only die…

August Wilhelm

Schlegel

1811

The

principal characters here are not those who act [like in Macbeth] but

those who suffer.

August Wilhelm

Schlegel

1811

[On the

relationship between plot and subplot] …with what

ingenuity and skill are the two main parts… dovetailed into one another!

August Wilhelm

Schlegel

1811

[Schlegel

argues that if only Lear suffered betrayal by his offspring the play would be

a ‘private’ and individual tragedy, but the addition of

Edgar and Gloucester’s (similar) story gives...] ...the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world…

August Wilhelm

Schlegel

1811

The

threefold dignity of a king, an old man, and a father, is dishonoured by the cruel ingratitude of his

unnatural daughters

August Wilhelm

Schlegel

1811

[A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is

a 1991 novel that is a retelling of the Lear story set on an American farm.

Interestingly in Smiley's version it emerges that the wealthy farmer's eldest

two daughters have been sexually abused by their father.]

Jane

Smiley

1991

[About

Kent and Cordelia] Plain speech and

conscientious breeches of decorum remain touchstones of value [throughout the

play].

Richard

Strier

1988

…the love test is a kind of game that

Lear is playing…

Richard

Strier

1988

[Tate

explains his rationale for adding a love story between

Edgar and Cordelia] The

Distress [emotion] of the Story is evidently heightened by it…

Nahum

Tate

1681

[Referring

to the portrayal of Lear's and Edgar's madness] …a Heap of Jewels, unstrung, and unpolisht; yet so dazzling in their Disorder…

Nahum

Tate

1681

This

Method necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude

in a Success to the innocent distrest Persons:

Otherwise I must have incumbered the Stage with dead Bodies, which Conduct

makes many Tragedies conclude with unreasonable

Jests. Yet I was Rackt with no small Fears for so

bold a Change, till I found it well receiv’d by my

Audience…

Nahum

Tate

1681

...punishment [is part of] the Jacobean pattern in this play.

Leonard

Tennenhouse

1986

…when he

determines the rules of inheritance according to his will and not according

to the principle of primogeniture, he appears to deny the

metaphysics of the body politic and the special status of the king’s blood.

Leonard

Tennenhouse

1986

When the

will of the king is to divest monarchy of power, the carnage that ensues

implies that it is a primal law of nature that has been

violated.

Leonard

Tennenhouse

1986

[On the

representation of madness in the play] …coldly pompous,

artificial ravings… …senseless

inappropriate words…

Leo

Tolstoy

1906

[On

being a younger brother] …their state is of all stations

for gentlemen most miserable…

Thomas

Wilson

1600

…16th

and 17th-century Englishmen were deeply preoccupied with

the problems of order and degree.

Keith

Wrightson

1982

…they

[16th and 17th century Englishmen] envisaged a 'great

chain of being'… in which each creature, each created thing, had its

appointed place.

Keith

Wrightson

1982