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King Lear
Asignatura: Teatro Renacentista Inglés
31 Documentos
Los estudiantes compartieron 31 documentos en este curso
Universidad: Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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KING LEAR, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Introduction
King Lear is widely regarded as Shakespeare's crowning artistic achievement. The
scenes in which a mad Lear rages naked on a stormy heath against his deceitful
daughters and nature itself are considered by many scholars to be the finest example of
tragic lyricism in the English language. Shakespeare took his main plot line of an aged
monarch abused by his children from a folk tale that appeared first in written form in the
12th century and was based on spoken stories that originated much further into the
Middle Ages. In several written versions of "Lear," the king does not go mad, his
"good" daughter does not die, and the tale has a happy ending.
This is not the case with Shakespeare's Lear, a tragedy of such consuming force that
audiences and readers are left to wonder whether there is any meaning to the physical
and moral carnage with which King Lear concludes. Like the noble Kent, seeing a mad,
pathetic Lear with the murdered Cordelia in his arms, the profound brutality of the tale
compels us to wonder, "Is this the promised end?" (V.iii.264). That very question stands
at the divide between traditional critics of King Lear who find a heroic pattern in the
story and modern readers who see no redeeming or purgative dimension to the play at
all, the message being the bare futility of the human condition with Lear as Everyman.
Critical Evaluation
Since it was first staged and published in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare's
King Lear has been the subject of extensive literary interpretation and the object of
intense critical debate. The key issue here is whether King Lear is a classical tragedy
with a redemptive moral or a radical departure from genre conventions, a play with a
profoundly pessimistic, even nihilistic, view of man and the world he briefly inhabits.
At the center of the division between the traditional and the modern readings of
Shakespeare's Lear is the subject and theme of nature, human and universal, and the
question of whether there is a moral order to be discerned within its workings. The
traditional view of King Lear points to an array of unnatural forces, most notably Lear's
premature abdication of his throne and his rejection of Cordelia's qualified love, as
temporarily overturning the moral mechanisms of nature. This view of King Lear
ascribes a regenerative function to nature, one that imparts a tragic nobility to the play's
final outcome. On the other hand, many modern literary critics see unbridled and
chaotic nature as the central force behind Lear's fall, with the overwhelming power of a
brutish cosmos crushing Lear into a pathetic madman pointlessly crying out in a world
without hope for redemption.
From a traditional perspective, Lear's downfall is the result of a tragic flaw in his
character: his majestic sense of himself is not bounded by the norms of the natural
order. Owing to this self-inflated dignity, Lear is blind to the natural precepts that
govern Cordelia's response to her father's concern with the extent of her filial devotion.
He not only fails to grasp Cordelia's moral viewpoint, he creates the preconditions for
his own demise. He does so by abdicating his throne, disowning his natural child and
