Critics Flashcards
Foakes
Old age
‘a pathetic senior citizen trapped in a hostile environment’
Heil, good dog
Heilman
Sight
“The old men themselves come to insight through suffering”
Heilman
Lear’s love
“He insists upon the untenable proposition that love can be measured”
Heilman
Lears Power
“his failure to perceive that a king cannot be a king without a crown”
Heilman
Gloucester
“Gloucester is the object of manipulation… he too easily yields to that in which he should see evil”
Rubio
Cordelia/women
cordelia uses “silence, the only possible form of subversion for upper-class women”
Johnson
good vs evil
“the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry”
Woods
Fool/Vulnerability
“Lear has no soliloquies… the Fool provides the means for Lear to use a more intimate and unguarded voice”
it aint natural to pack no shus
Shupack
Natural Order/C’s Death
Cordelia’s death “denies the necessity of a just natural order.”
Edmund swung too Mcfar
McNeir
Edmunds Character development
“sinks into the abyss of evil once more, and tries to crawl out-too late.”
Savvas
End of Play
“By the end of the play, we have realized that there are no longer any frontiers between the wise and the ridiculous, between the sane and the insane, between man and beast, or even between man and the gods”
Savvas
Justice contrasts Johnson
Good and bad suffer alike and there is no mercy in either case.
Dunn
Selfishness
“Goneril, Regan, Oswald, Cornwall and Edmund display a selfishness so callous it cannot be touched by human pity”
Dun Dun DUNN
Dunn
Religion
“The storm acts as a symbol of the last judgement…connotations of doomsday that would have reached a christian audience”
McLaughlin
Power Hunger
“his three daughters and Edmund are driven by the need to achieve social, personal, and sexual power.”
