King Lear is universal - the tragedy is in a distantly remote and

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King Lear is universal - the tragedy is in a distantly remote and deliberately undefined historical period and location. Has resulted in its survival. The emptiness of the stage at the Globe Theatre allowed Shakespeare to both set his plays in any location and to put them in no particular setting, allowing him to draw the attention of the audience to the essentials of the play. Kind Lear portrays universal themes and situations such as the intolerance of the young towards the old, good versus evil, the vulnerability of old age, and he hidden nature of supernatural beings.

Interpretations/readings

Modern criticism - A modern critic argues that history, rather than fate or the gods, is the cause of tragedy. The origins of tragedy lie in identificable social causes and are capable of being resisted. Image clusters in the play are seen by John F Danby to be expressing the conflict between two sides of nature, benign and divinely ordered and the other governed by self-interest.

They argue that traditional interpretations put a heavy emphasis on character and other abstractions such as the themes, which are misleading. They focus on how social conditions are reflected in characters’ relationships, language and behavior. It also concerns itself with how changing social assumptions at different periods of time have affected interpretations of the play. They see the play exposing the economic and social roots of injustice and inequality and that Lear’s England reflects Shakespeare’s world. Victor Kiernan believes that the tragedies are an indication of or foreshadow Shakespeare’s own experience of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He argues that Shakespeare’s concern was for the poor whose toil and suffering paid for the pleasures of the rich.

Feminists - the play challenges the beliefs and practices that result in the oppression and subordination of women. Evidence: Lear treats his daughters as subordinates who must obey him, misogyny found in lear’s threats and curses, sexual disgust (Lear), women seen as property (banishment of Cordelia). Kathleen McLuskie argues that audience sympathy is manipulated to evoke compassion for lear, depite the hatred he displays towards women.

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Romantics - Charles Lamb thought the play unactable – that no actor’s gestures could represent lear’s suffering mind. Lambs conclusion that Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage’ was agreed with by Hazlitt who thought the play ‘too great for the stage’. In his opinion, it was a play to e read and best experienced in the imagination. The romantics of the nineteenth century felt the ending appropriate because after surviving so many sufferings, Lear can only die’. Chambers said that the ending reflects the victory of love and divine justice on earth. Lear is seen as the ...

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