Critics (AO5) Flashcards
(41 cards)
Foakes: Old Age
‘A pathetic senior citizen trapped in a hostile environment’
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: Lear’s 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’
Shupack: Nature order/ C’s Death
Cordelia’s death ‘denies the necessity of a just natural order’
McNeir: Edmund’s 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 realised 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’
Dunn: religion
‘The storm acts as a symbol of the last judgment…connotations of doomsday that would have reached a Christian audience’
McLaughlin: power hungry
‘His three daughters and Edmund are driven by the need to achieve social, personal, and sexual power’
Kathleen Mcluskie: order
‘A destructive reversal of the rightful order’
Kathleen Mckluskie: women
‘Women are made either to submit-Cordelia- or must be destroyed- Goneril and Regan’
Kathleen Mckluskie: Cordelia & women
‘Cordelia’s return is a restoration of patriarchy, of the old order. But this cannot be wholly reduced to male power’
Kathleen McLuskie: family bonds
‘family relations in this play are seen as fixed and determined, and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of natural order’
S.L.Goldberg: justice
‘There is no supernatural justice- only human natural justice’
Coppelia Kahn: madness and women
‘Lear goes mad because he is unable to accept his dependence on the feminine, his daughters’
Helen Norris: unnatural behaviour
‘The horror of Lear’s story is the unnatural behaviour of Goneril and Regan…not only personal sins but an upsetting of civilised values’
Hal Halbrook: Lear as a father
‘He has clung steadfastly to the conviction that he is a loving father despite all evidence of the contrary’
A.Kettle: Lear’s madness
‘Lear’s madness is not so much a breakdown as a breakthrough. It is necessary’
‘It is through his madness […] that Lear comes to a new outlook on life’
