Lear Flashcards
(7 cards)
Simon Russel Beale
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.
Heilman
“The sanity of the mad is that they can understand eternal truths”
Jan Kott
“He does not see or understand anything… Lear is ridiculous, naive and stupid”.
Kenneth Muir
“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.”
Emily Sun
“under their clothes, the king is the equal of the beggar”
Susan Heinzelman
“what “drives Lear mad” is the “recognition that the injustice he suffers… is the injustice he has already rendered”.
A.C. Bradley
“Lear’s fate would appear to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic”.