Lear

Question 1

Simon Russel Beale

Answer 1

Lear as having Lewy Body Dementia.
Doesn’t soliloquise- can’t communicate properly?
One of the only S-p characters that we see make their mistake early on- don’t see the King that Cordelia etc. love.
Sympathy interesting- he is horrible and yet it would be wrong if we didn’t feel sorry for him at the end- sympathy should come from the fact that he is aware that he is ill.

Question 2

Heilman

Answer 2

“The sanity of the mad is that they can understand eternal truths”

Question 3

Jan Kott

Answer 3

“He does not see or understand anything… Lear is ridiculous, naive and stupid”.

Question 4

Kenneth Muir

Answer 4

“Elizabethan dramatists usually used prose for the speech of mad persons… Lear moves in an out of prose, using a form of verse in his more coherent moments.”

Question 5

Emily Sun

Answer 5

“under their clothes, the king is the equal of the beggar”

Question 6

Susan Heinzelman

Answer 6

“what “drives Lear mad” is the “recognition that the injustice he suffers… is the injustice he has already rendered”.

Question 7

A.C. Bradley

Answer 7

“Lear’s fate would appear to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic”.