M S and L critics

Question 1

LEAR Cordelia

Answer 1

John DANBY ‘She is the norm by which the wrongness’ is judged

Question 2

LEAR Goneril and Regan’s sins

Answer 2

‘these are not only personal sins, but an upsetting of civilised values’

Question 3

What is the principle theme of the play?

Answer 3

LAMAR ‘the education and purification of Lear’

BLOOM For those who believe that divine justice somehow prevails in this world, King Lear ought to be offensive

Question 4

LEAR justice

Answer 4

Goldberg ‘There is no supernatural justice- only human natural justice’

Question 5

LEAR the fool

Answer 5

“Shakespeare uses the beings that his world deems lowly and foolish to destabilize conventional wisdom about class and to subvert the hierarchal expectations of his culture.” - Cheri Y. Halvorson;

Question 6

LEAR nature

Answer 6

"”King Lear” can be regarded as a play dramatising the meaning of the single word ‘nature’” - J.F. Danby

Question 7

Who believed that virtue triumphed at the end of Lear?

Answer 7

Bradley

The play ‘King Lear’ is monstrously unjust

Question 8

Todorov

Answer 8

The idea of an equilibrium in society, and the desire to break/create a new equilibrium.

Question 9

Lear: under the fine…

Answer 9

Frank Kermode: Under the fine clothes, there is nothing but greed and lust

Question 10

LEAR the effect of the play

Answer 10

C.J. Sisson - The play destabilises our theological and moral assurances

GREENBLATT - King Lear is “part of an intense and sustained struggle in late sixteenth- and early seven- teenth-century england to redefine the central values of society”

Question 11

LEAR good v bad

Answer 11

JOHNSON A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry

Question 12

LEAR britain

Answer 12

KNIGHT King Lear is representative of “not ancient Britain, but humanity, not England, but the World”

Question 13

LEAR G and R are

Answer 13

HUDSON Goneril and Regan are “personifications of ingratitude”

Question 14

Which critic saw Edmund as typifying the new bourgeois ethic of individual materialism

Answer 14

Paul Delany - Marxist

Question 15

LEAR binary opposites

Answer 15

HARE One must be poor to be rich, a fool to be wise and blind to see

Question 16

Who focused on absence of mother figure?

Answer 16

Coppelia Kahn: (psych and fem)

• Lear fails because he fights against his own repressed need for a mother figure
• G and R, with no maternal guide, have grown up selfish and heartless

Question 17

LEAR suffering/C’s death

Answer 17

SALGADO the very pointlessness of Cordelia’s death and Lear’s suffering is the point.’

Question 18

LEAR Lear’s character

Answer 18

SALGADO King, a father, a master and a man. As the action develops, the first three roles are stripped from him and he is forced to consider what the last of them means.’

Question 19

LEAR moral vantage point?

Answer 19

GOLDBERG ‘the play does not offer us anything like… a guaranteed moral vantage point’

Question 20

LEAR Shakespearean tragedy?

Answer 20

KASTAN sees S’s tragedy as intense treatments of age-old question about whether the cause of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution, or arbitrary fate

Question 21

LEAR the ending

Answer 21

ROCHE “as bleak and unrewarding as man can reach outside the gates of hell”

Question 22

LEAR events following his abdication

Answer 22

MACK “the waiting coil of consequences”

Question 23

LEAR the fool

Answer 23

KOTT He is the only character to realise that “the only true madness is to regard the world as rational”

Question 24

LEAR common humanity

Answer 24

BRADLEY Lear learns to “pierce through rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath”

Question 25

LEAR animal imagery

Answer 25

CHURCH The vast amount of animal imagery in the play “seems to say that the underlying nature of human beings is that of the worst jungle animals”

Question 26

LEAR bonds

Answer 26

O’Toole “Duty and bonds are the values of a feudal society, ‘how much?’ is the basic question of a capitalist one. Lear breaks the bonds, bringing his kingdom and all the fixed relationships within it tumbling down with the question ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’”

Question 27

LEAR feminist

Answer 27

McLUSKIE The play is ultimately anti-feminist,

Question 28

LEAR father-daughter relationship

Answer 28

NOVY King Lear criticises the powerful rights fathers held over their daughters; Lear abuses his authority over Cordelia, and then needs her forgiveness. The balance of the patriarchal structure is subsequently threatened, as the traditional ruler-subject relationship is upset

Question 29

LEAR a negative view of his madness

Answer 29

TOLSTOY ‘senseless, inappropriate words’

Question 30

Kermode distrusts criticism that seeks to redefine the play for each successive generation of academics

Answer 30

‘being patient of interpretation’ the play is timeless, always relevant

Question 31

LEAR hierarchy

Answer 31

HALVERSON “Shakespeare’s reasons for not using a person of equal rank to set another straight may be an indication of his own opinions about social hierarchy.”

Question 32

LEAR themes?

Answer 32

CHURCH Naked ambition and jealousy appear to ride roughshod over what should be the true relationship between a father and his children, a master and his servants.

Question 33

LEAR heath scenes

Answer 33

They have become voices rather than people,

Question 34

Lear capitalism and selfishness

Answer 34

FROAN The play is an early critique of capitalism and selfishness

Question 35

KNIGHTS

Answer 35

a microcosm of the human race

Question 36

LEAR disintegration

Answer 36

KOLT King Lear is about the disintegration of the world

Question 37

LEAR ‘a destructive reversal of the rightful order’

Answer 37

McCluskie

Question 38

LEAR religion?

Answer 38

MAXWELL A christian play about a pagan world

Question 39

LEAR reveals from the very start, a society in turmoil

Answer 39

KETTLE

Question 40

LEAR elton

Answer 40

the actions of an upside down providence in an apparently deranged universe

The last act shatters the foundations of faith itself