Since the beginning of the 20th century, King Lear has displaced Hamlet in critical esteem as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It has been acclaimed as a Christian drama of redemptive love and self-consuming evil. Alternatively, it has been regarded as an ancestor of the modern existentialist theatre of the ‘absurd’; and in an extension of this view, critics (most forcefully but not exclusively those of a cultural materialist bent) have found in the play a skeptical nihilism underlying the late Renaissance at large. Within the past forty years, increasingly textual scholarship has raised the question whether in the quarto and folio texts we have two distinct versions, the latter the product of authorial revision, with different emphases and even different significance.
After an opening class on the sources in Holinshed’s Chronicles, the anonymous play King Leir, and Spenser, with photocopied extracts made available, we will explore all these large issues. Subsequent sessions will each concentrate on approximately one act of the play, but more especially upon a particular theme. Thus for example the second class will take as its starting point Lear’s proposed partition of his kingdom, and develop its consequences for his relations with his daughters and his own status as a king.
Learning outcomes
- The earlier versions of the Lear legend as sources for Shakespeare’s play.
- The differences between the Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear.
- How Shakespeare’s is the most unrelievedly bleak version of the legend.
