Related Papers
IMAGO. Revista de Emblemática y Cultura Visual
The emblem tradition in Shakespeare’s plays: mirror-effects and anamorphoses
2017 •
Jean-Jacques chardin
Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare
Intertheatrical Cues and Shakespearean backstories
2021 •
William Engel
This study addresses the boundary between the stage and lived experience by focusing on evocations of prior histories of Shakespeare’s characters. Taking the battle of wit carried out by means of commonplaces and proverbs in Henry V (3.7) as a focal case study, as well as considering other such telling moments in The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado, Hamlet, Cymbeline, and Henry V, my investigation offers a viable approach to staging the presentation of characters’ backstories. My goal is to recover and comment on a set of principles for understanding one of the chief ways in which the Shakespearean text is set up to guide both affective and expressive interpretation of characters. More broadly, this paper involves larger questions of how memory shapes identity, including the forging of memorable moments within the given performance reflecting normative stage business and other embodied forms of intertheatricality. This essay demonstrates how attention to the playw...
The Dialectics of Speech and Silence in Shakespeare's King Lear
Bilal Hamamra
This article deploys the critical lines of new historicism, feminism and performance studies to argue that Shakespeare's King Lear is a critique of King James I's absolute authority and the destructive ideology of gender difference via the binary opposites of speech and silence. A new historicist reading would argue that the dominant male powers in King Lear eliberately foster the subversive behaviour of others (Cordelia, Regan, Goneril, Edmund) in order to crush it publicly and so assert their dominance. However, in this paper, I argue that King Lear is a trial of language, ending with the renunciation of patriarchal speech and the subordination of male figures to Cordelia's silence. Following materialist feminist criticism, I argue that Regan and Goneril are reproducers of the masculine ideology of power, property and linguistic domination. While Shakespeare criticises male figures' absolute voices that are ventriloquised by Regan, Goneril and Edmund, he represents silence as a subjective space of truth and honesty and a site of rebellion against unjust speech as illuminated in the figure of Cordelia whose silence undermines Lear's game of words.
Multicultural Shakespeare
Finding Refuge in King Lear: From Brexit to Shakespeare's European Value
2019 •
Stephen O'Neill
This article considers how Shakespeare's King Lear has become a Brexit play across a range of discourses and media, from theatre productions and journalism to social media. With its themes of division and disbursem*nt, of cliff edges and tragic self-immolation, Lear is the Shakespearean play that has been turned to as metaphor and analogy for the UK's decision following the 23 June 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Reading this presentist application of Shakespeare, the article attends to Shakespeare as itself a discourse through which cultural ideas, both real and imaginary, about Brexit and the EU are negotiated. It asks how can we might remap Lear in this present context-what other meanings and histories are to be derived from the play, especially in Lear's exile and search for refuge, or in Cordelia's departure for and return from France? Moving from a consideration of a Brexit Lear to an archipelagic and even European Lear, this article argues that Shakespeare is simultaneously a site of supranational connections and of a desire for values of empathy and refuge that reverberate with debates about migration in Europe.
Shakespeare and Greece
Physis and Nomos in *King Lear*
2017 •
Nic Panagopoulos
More Ado about "Nothing" in King Lear
Adrian Papahagi
The present paper explores the philosophical and structural importance of “nothing” in King Lear. Stripped of crown, country, kin and majesty, and eventually deprived of human aspect and reason, Lear learns to “make use of nothing”. Lear’s kenosis leads to anagnorisis, namely to the acceptance of his folly, and to the discovery that man is “no more than this”. The numerous occurrences of “nothing” are analysed from several perspectives, including textual criticism. After the examination of First Quarto (Q1) and First Folio (F1) variants in relevant passages, the author suggests that F1 is not Shakespeare’s revision of Q1; indeed, both versions present corrupt readings of the original.
English Studies at NBU
Every Turn of the Wheel. Circular Time and Cordelia's Revolt: from William Shakespeare to the British Enlightenment
2017 •
Tadd Fernée
This article argues that William Shakespeare's King Lear anticipates core political dynamics of the English Civil War (1641-49), and philosophical tenets of the British Enlightenment in John Locke and David Hume. It analyzes three principle and competing paradigms of public authority in King Lear: theodicy, nature, and the autonomy of thought. The play is historically contextualized within the 16 th century. King Lear, moreover, portends revolutionary new thought patterns: the centerless universe of modern astronomy, and human embeddedness in fluid nature without fixed identity. Three variants on the concept of " nothing " – existential, social, and philosophical-interweave the cosmic and political threads, based on a circular temporality. Shakespeare's character, Cordelia, affirms the everyday over the cosmic, and the sociological over the metaphysical. King Lear depicts a profound moral trans-valuation in early modern history, whose shifting temporal horizons remain central also to contemporary politics.
Future Histories in King Lear
Meredith Beales
Religions
Lear, Luke 17, and Looking for the Kingdom Within
2019 •
Emily Stelzer
The ending to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Lear has generated much debate. Performance history and critical interpretations of the conclusion of the Folio version of Lear have been pronouncedly divided into readings intimating the tragic hero’s redemption and readings averring his ultimately bleak condition, whether of delusion or despair. Recent attempts to describe Shakespeare’s use of scripture in this play have offered more nuance, acknowledging the play’s blending of pagan and Christian elements. While King Lear has extensively been compared to the book of Job and to apocalyptic passages in Revelation and Daniel, allusions to the gospel narratives and to Luke in particular raise the thorny question of Cordelia’s role as a Christ-figure. This essay argues that the ambiguous and suggestive nature of Lear’s final words (“Look there, look there!”) is both preserved and illuminated when read as an allusion to Jesus’ words in Luke 17:21. This previously unexplored allusion not only ...
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE ANC COMMUNICATION
THE FATHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP IN SHAKESPEARE'S KING LEAR FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BOWEN FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY
2023 •
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION UPM
King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, describing a father’s sorrow over his daughters’ unfilial or disobedient behavior. Although the father-daughter relationship in the play is often studied, to date, this relationship has not been investigated from the perspective of the Bowen family systems theory. Thus, the present study adopts the new interdisciplinary research method, the Bowen theory, to interpret the father-daughter relationship in King Lear. The focus of this article is to analyse the level of self-differentiation of Lear and the three daughters, namely Regan, Goneril, Cordelia in King Lear. It will thoroughly investigate the fusion and differentiation in their interactions with their original and nuclear families and examine the projection of Lear’s chronic anxiety on his daughters. Chronic anxiety due to social factors, such as humanism, feudalism, and patriarchy, and their impact on the father-daughter relationship in the tragedy, will also be investigated. It argues that the father-daughter relationship in King Learis dysfunctional due to the lower level of differentiation of self between Lear and his three daughters, the projection of Lear’s anxiety onto the daughters, and the chronic anxiety brought about by societal regression. Hence, through the lens of the Bowen family systems theory, the study of the father-daughter relationship in the play can provide a new method for examining the dysfunctional family relationship in literary works.
