Critical Approaches to King Lear PDF

# Critical approaches ## Traditional criticism What must be remembered about critical responses to *King Lear* from the late seventeenth century until the early twentieth, is that critics did not see Shakespeare's play acted. From 1681 until well into the nineteenth century, they saw Nahum Tate's...

# Critical approaches ## Traditional criticism What must be remembered about critical responses to *King Lear* from the late seventeenth century until the early twentieth, is that critics did not see Shakespeare's play acted. From 1681 until well into the nineteenth century, they saw Nahum Tate's radically rewritten version. Shakespeare's own version, heavily cut, was not seen again until 1845 and for fifty years afterwards stage productions removed huge chunks of Shakespeare's version. Sustained critical writing on the play is generally agreed to begin with the leading eighteenth-century critic Doctor Samuel Johnson. He embodies the tradition of his time, which was to attempt to find moral instruction in the theatre. Johnson was appalled by Gloucester's blinding, and found the ending 'contrary to the natural ideas of justice'. Johnson's comment on the final scene has become perhaps the best-known early response to the play: > I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play until I undertook to revise them as an editor. Other early critics followed Johnson in regretting what they saw as the play's gratuitous violence and sensationalism. But the Romantic critics of the early nineteenth century responded enthusiastically to what they read. Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought the play 'like the hurricane and the whirlpool' and called it 'the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet.' William Hazlitt judged *King Lear* 'the best of all Shakespeare's plays' because it is the one in which he was most 'in earnest.' And John Keats in his letters argued that the intensity of the poetry dispelled the 'disagreeables' portrayed. Keats' sonnet 'On sitting down to read King Lear once again' has become famous for its succinct descriptions of the play and the searing experience of the reader's response: > Once again, the fierce dispute Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay Must I burn through. But one Romantic critic found a difficulty with King Lear. Charles Lamb thought the play unactable. He mocked the 'contemptible machinery' that mimics the storm, and asserted that no actor's gestures could represent Lear's suffering mind. Lamb scoffed: > To see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting... The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. Lamb's conclusion that 'Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage' was quoted with approval by Hazlitt, who thought the play 'too great for the stage.' In his view, it was a play to be read and to be best experienced in the imagination. That view was confirmed by Shelley, who judged it 'the most perfect specimen of dramatic poetry existing in the world.' Swinburne shared the same high estimation of the play on the page, but was struck by the lack of justice in the play. For him, Gloucester's remark 'As flies to wanton boys are we to th'gods; / They kill us for their sport' is the keynote of the play. His reading led him to assert: > Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity, mercy, are words without meaning here. ## The subject of *Lear* is renunciation, and it is only by being wilfully blind that one can fail to understand what Shakespeare is saying. Nevertheless, Tolstoy's criticism is valuable because of the category mistake it makes. Tolstoy read *King Lear* as if it were a naturalistic novel, like his own *War and Peace* or *Anna Karenina*, rather than a dramatic script of soaring imagination. In that misjudgement of the genre or nature of the play are echoes of earlier criticism, such as Doctor Johnson's concern to find moral teaching in theatre. Such approaches are mainly concerned with character, and judge the characters as if they were real persons. From the late eighteenth century until well into the twentieth, that focus on moral judgement and character has been a dominant, perhaps the dominant, aspect of critical writing about *King Lear*. The critic with whom the expression 'character study is most associated is A C Bradley. Around 100 years ago, Bradley delivered a course of lectures at Oxford University which were published in 1904 as *Shakespearean Tragedy*. The book has never been out of print, and Bradley's approach has been hugely influential. Bradley considered only four plays as 'pure tragedies': *Hamlet,* *Othello,* *King Lear* and *Macbeth*. He talked of the characters in the tragedies as though they were real human beings existing in worlds recognisable to modern readers. For him, each character experienced familiar human emotions and thoughts. Bradley identified the unique desires and motives which gave each character their particular personality, and which evoked feelings of admiration or disapproval in the audience. He argued that the conflict in the plays is primarily that of an inner struggle within the characters. He saw each tragic hero struggling with circumstances and fate, and afflicted with a fatal flaw that causes the tragedy: > In almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion or habit of mind. This, it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. > some marked imperfection or defect: irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions and the like... these contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe. The defect of this aspect of Bradley's approach is evident. Othello does suffer from jealousy, Macbeth from ambition. But those are not their only traits. Hamlet displays a range of possible 'flaws' which contribute towards the tragedy: melancholy, hatred of Claudius, incapacity to act, over-thoughtfulness. To attribute Lear's tragedy simply to his obsession with 'filial ingratitude' would be to ignore other significant aspects of his character, not least the political misjudgement exemplified in dividing his kingdom. Like all Shakespeare's tragic heroes, Lear has more than 'one interest, object, passion or habit of mind'. In his stress on the dramatic function of character, Bradley interpreted the tragedies as stories that reassured the audience or reader: tragedy was a process which, after catastrophe, paradoxically results in order, unity and goodness. Although the tragedies presented conflict and waste, evil was eventually overcome; the ending, if not happy, promised something better ahead. For Bradley, virtue and goodness triumphed in spite of suffering, adversity and death. For example, he argues that *King Lear* ends with: > a sense of law and beauty... a consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we cannot fathom. Modern critics are sceptical of the optimism of Bradley's thinly-veiled Christian interpretation of the play as showing 'the effect of suffering in reviving the greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature'. They also reject Bradley's view of tragedy as mystical and indescribable ('piteous, fearful and mysterious'). In modern criticism, the origins of tragedy lie in identifiable social causes, and are capable of being resisted. Bradley did not only focus on character in his exploration of King Lear. He asked crucial questions which have recurred in critical approaches ever since, for example: Is it a good stage play? Is it well constructed? Is the opening scene credible? Is the death of Cordelia dramatically justifiable? Was Lear redeemed? Is the play fundamentally pessimistic? Does it reflect Shakespeare's personal feelings? Although Bradley has fallen from critical favour, his influence is still evident, and pages 118-24 show, it is difficult to avoid talking or writing about characters as if they were living people and making moral judgements on them. Furthermore, Bradley's criticism extended more widely than character alone and has provided a starting point for different approaches to the play which developed throughout the twentieth century. Caroline Spurgeon greatly extended Bradley's examination of the play's imagery. In her book *Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us*, Spurgeon identifies patterns of imagery in each of Shakespeare's plays. She finds in *King Lear* 'only one overpowering and dominating continuous image', that of a body racked and tortured. She notes that the animal imagery distinctly augments the sensation of horror and bodily pain, and she gives many examples of how the play persistently provides metaphorical reminders of a human body in anguished movement: > Tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack. Today, Spurgeon's pioneering work is much criticised, not only for its narrow focus, but also for its bardolatry and its endeavour to identify in the imagery Shakespeare's own likes, dislikes, and personality. Notwithstanding such flaws, her work is immensely valuable in encouraging the study of imagery, which is such a distinctive feature of every Shakespeare play. Later critics have stressed the importance of other image clusters in the play: sight and blindness, clothes, madness in reason and reason in madness, the gods, nature. Such image clusters usually lead into discussion of how they express or embody the themes of the play. For example, John F Danby uses the concept of 'nature' to interpret the play, seeing it as expressing the conflict between two views of nature, one benign, rational and divinely ordered, the other governed by self-interest and appetite. Many other critics have pointed out how frequently 'Nature', 'natural', or 'unnatural', appear in the play, expressing many different meanings, often resonating with irony: a child's birthright, illegitimate, the bonds of love and loyalty, the natural world, a goddess, the given order or hierarchy of things or society, obligations and duties, universal laws, established authority and human nature itself (benign and forgiving or malign and selfish). An alternative example of a thematic approach is expressed by Frank Kermode: > In this play, not for the first time, Shakespeare concerns himself with the contrast between the two bodies of the king; one lives by ceremony, administers justice in a furred gown, distinguished by regalia which set him above nature. The other is born naked, subject to disease and pain, and protected only by the artifices of ceremony from natural suffering and nakedness. So Lear is stripped, and moves from the ceremonies of the first scene to the company of a naked 'natural', the thing itself. The play deals with what intervenes between our natural and our artificially comfortable conditions: ceremony, justice, love, evil. In a different approach, G Wilson Knight's influential *The Wheel of Fire* identifies 'the comedy of the grotesque' that Knight finds in the play. He argues that it displays realities that are in turn 'absurd, hideous, pitiful' as it moves from the absurdity of the opening scene through the 'fantastic incongruity' of parent and child opposed, the Fool's perception of humour in heart-wrenching situations, Edgar's 'fantastic impersonation' and the ludicrousness of Gloucester's suicide attempt. He notes the 'demonic laughter that echoes in the Lear universe', and sees the play as crucially about 'a tremendous soul incongruously geared to a puerile intellect.' Nevertheless, Knight possesses the same view of the play as Bradley, seeing in it the Christian notion of redemption: Cordelia embodies the principle of ideal love, and Lear is redeemed (like Job in the Bible) through suffering. But in a judgement that prefigures that of Jan Kott (see page 93), Knight claims about *King Lear*: > In no tragedy of Shakespeare do incident and dialogue so recklessly and miraculously walk the tight-rope of our pity over the depths of bathos and absurdity. Wilson Knight is one of many critics who have detected Christian patterns and values embedded in the play, in particular the Christian doctrines of redemption and patience, heaven and hell. Such critics have sought to find religious meaning in the suffering, even picturing Lear as Christ-like. For example, J C Maxwell described King Lear as 'a Christian play about a pagan world.' L C Knights thought of it as 'directed towards affirmation in spite of everything'. Other critics have challenged such views. Clifford Leech argued that a Christian tragedy is impossible; Nicholas Brooke found the ending 'without any support from systems of moral or artistic belief at all'; R G Hunter found the play 'harshly pagan' and argued that in it Shakespeare dramatised the possibility that there is no God; and John Holloway perceived Lear as a scapegoat, and claimed that the ending provided meagre consolation. Probably the two best-known critics of the Christian interpretation of King Lear are Barbara Everett and W R Elton. Everett criticised interpretations that attempted to turn the tragedy into an allegory or miracle or morality play. She argues that the play is the product of a Christian world-view, but lacks doctrinal and allegorical Christian dimensions. She points out that the scenes which are most full of explicitly 'Christian' phrasing, or suggestion, or feeling, are confined, on the whole, to the period between the storm scenes and the entry of Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms. She argues that the mood and tone of these scenes may be caused 'as much by artistic reasons as by moral design'. Everett concludes: > It is obviously impossible to decide, simply, whether or not King Lear is a 'Christian' play. William R Elton in *King Lear* and *The Gods* argues that Lear is not regenerated, that providence is not operative, and that the last act shatters 'the foundations of faith itself. He concludes that the play is not 'a drama of meaningful suffering and redemption, within just universe ruled by providential higher powers' and that its ironical structure is calculated to destroy faith in both poetic justice and divine justice. ## Modern criticism Throughout the second half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first, critical approaches to Shakespeare have radically challenged the style and assumptions of the traditional approaches described above. New critical approaches argue that traditional interpretations, with their heavy emphasis on character or metaphysical abstractions ('evil', 'justice', etc.), are individualistic and misleading. The traditional focus on personalities and emotions ignores society and history, and so divorces literary, dramatic and aesthetic matters from their social context. Furthermore, their detachment from the real world makes them elitist, sexist and unpolitical. Modern critical perspectives therefore shift the focus to how social conditions (of the world of the play and of Shakespeare's England) are reflected in characters' relationships, language and behaviour. Modern criticism also concerns itself with how changing social assumptions at different periods of time have affected interpretations of the play. This section will explore how recent critical approaches to Shakespeare can or have been used to address King Lear. Like traditional criticism, contemporary perspectives include many different approaches but share common features. Modern criticism: * is sceptical of 'character' approaches (but often uses them); * concentrates on political, social and economic factors (arguing that these factors determined Shakespeare's creativity and affect audiences' and critics' interpretations); * identifies contradictions, fragmentation and disunity in the plays; * questions the possibility of 'happy' or 'hopeful' endings, preferring ambiguous, unsettling or sombre endings; * produces readings that are subversive of existing social structures; * identifies how the plays express the interests of dominant groups, particularly rich and powerful males; * insists that 'theory' (psychological, social, etc.) is essential to produce valid readings; * often expresses its commitment to a particular cause or perspective (for example, to feminism, or equality, or political change); * argues all readings are political or ideological readings (and that traditional criticism falsely claims to be objective); * argues that traditional approaches have always interpreted Shakespeare conservatively, in ways that confirm and maintain the interests of the elite or dominant class. The following discussion is organised under headings which represent major contemporary critical perspectives (political, feminist, performance, psychoanalytic, postmodern). But it is vital to appreciate that there is often overlap between the categories, and that to pigeonhole any example of criticism too precisely is to reduce its value. ### Political criticism 'Political criticism' is a convenient label for approaches concerned with power and social structure in the world of the play, in Shakespeare's time and in our own. It exposes the economic and social roots of injustice and inequality. In such approaches a central assumption is that in tragedy individuals are destroyed by the workings of political power and historical forces, not by some 'tragic flaw' or by chance or fate or the gods. Tragedy is seen as caused by human beings, it is not divinely ordained. Here, King Lear is often viewed as portraying the conflict between a rigidly hierarchical feudal world of shared values and an emerging new society of thrusting individuals who reject old loyalties and beliefs. In this interpretation, Lear's England reflects Shakespeare's changing world, and Edmund is the model of the 'new man' governed by self-interest: he knows that disasters and bastardy are not caused by the stars, but are the result of human action and belief. Lear fails to realise the consequences of giving away power. Justice is in the hands of the powerful, and only in his suffering does Lear feel pity for 'Poor naked wretches' and see clearly that 'A dog's obeyed in office.' Similarly, only in his torment does Gloucester perceive that social justice requires removal of gross inequality: > So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. (Act 4 Scene 1, lines 65-6) Kiernan Ryan, writing in 1993, claimed that 'a new era' in the study of King Lear had begun 'over the past ten years', and that the reasons for the shift in direction of criticism 'can be summed up in one word: politics'. But as you will find below, the single word 'politics' does not sufficiently express the variety of modern criticism, and 'political' approaches to King Lear began well before Ryan's estimated date. For example in 1971, J W Lever in *The Tragedy of State* had firmly rejected the focus on the tragic hero in favour of concentration on the society in which he exists, arguing that tragedy 'is not primarily treatments of characters with a so-called "fatal flaw", whose downfall is brought about by the decree of just if inscrutable powers... the fundamental flaw is in the world they inhabit: in the political state, the social order it upholds.' Even earlier, in 1964, the Marxist critic Arnold Kettle had identified the 'heartless rationalisation' of the 'new people' who bring down Lear, and had argued that the play was an indictment of the social conditions of Shakespeare's times. One year later, a well-known challenge to traditional approaches was made by the Polish critic Jan Kott. Kott fought with the Polish army and underground movement against the Nazis in the Second World War (1939-45), and had direct experience of the suffering and terror caused by Stalinist repression in Poland in the years after the war. Kott's book *Shakespeare our Contemporary* (1965) saw parallels between the violence and cruelty of the modern world and the worlds of tyranny and despair that Shakespeare depicted in his tragedies. The importance of the title of Kott's book cannot be overstressed. It emphasises that Shakespeare is modern in his bleak view of human history and humanity itself. Kott argues that history, rather than fate or the gods, is the cause of tragedy. He uses the image of 'the Grand Mechanism' of history: a great staircase up which characters tread to their doom, each step 'marked by murder, perfidy, treachery.' It does not matter if a character is good or bad, history will overwhelm them. Characters have little or no power over their lives, but are swept aside by inevitable social and historical forces beyond their control. In this grim scenario of history, Kott equates King Lear with Samuel Beckett's *Endgame*: a play whose grotesque ending produces no catharsis (purging of the emotions). He identifies the absurdity of the fall from Dover cliff and, interpreting the blinded Gloucester as Everyman wandering through the world, claims that the theme of *King Lear* is 'an enquiry into the meaning of this journey, into the existence or non-existence of heaven and hell' and 'the decay and fall of the world'. For Kott, the play shows that: > All bonds, all laws, whether divine, natural or human, are broken... Social order, from the kingdom to the family, will crumble into dust... There are only huge Renaissance monsters devouring one another like beasts of prey. Before Kott's book was published in English, he discussed his interpretation with the director Peter Brook, and their discussion strongly influenced Brook's notoriously bleak production in 1962 (see page 100). Many later productions have also been affected by Kott's view of how the play's tragic grotesquerie is appropriate to the modern world. Kott's interpretations have been much criticised, but they can be seen as forerunners of new approaches which focus on the social and political contexts and causes of tragedy. Kiernan Ryan's interpretation is notable in arguing that *King Lear*, like Shakespeare's other tragedies, does not just question the inequalities and injustices of Shakespeare's England, but offers the liberating vision that human suffering is not inevitable (as in traditional views of tragedy): > Lear dramatises the cost in potential equality and mutual fulfilment of the humanly contrived structures of division and domination responsible for the tragedy. Jonathan Dollimore's key book, *Radical Tragedy* (1989), similarly argues that criticism should centre instead upon society, particularly on 'class, sexuality, imperialist and colonial exploitation'. Dollimore has no doubt about the relationships between King Lear (and other Jacobean tragedies) and the state. He claims that in those plays, Shakespeare and other playwrights actively question and subvert contemporary political power and ideology, making visible the power struggles within Jacobean society. For Dollimore, the tragedies expose the injustices and inequalities of that society. They question the beliefs and structures which maintain those unfair practices, for example monarchical rule in which Queen Elizabeth or King James and a small number of aristocrats enjoyed total power and huge privilege. Dollimore's attack on character study is equally fundamental. He challenges the 'central assumptions of the traditional reading of character, human nature and individual identity' of earlier criticism. For Dollimore, human personality is determined by, and reflects, the historical conditions of the time. It is not stable or unified, but fractured and full of contradictions. He argues that the malcontents in the tragedies, like Edmund in *King Lear*, are representations of such unstable, fractured personalities, and are both the victims and agents of social corruption. As such, they reveal the true nature of society: > the Jacobean malcontent... is not the antithesis of social process but its focus... the focus of political, social, and ideological contradiction. Many 'political' critics avoid speculating about Shakespeare's own politics or his intentions in writing his tragedies. But one Marxist critic, Victor Kiernan, attempts to root the tragedies squarely in Shakespeare's own experience of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean, England. Kiernan argues that Shakespeare's concern was for the poor whose toil and suffering paid for the pleasures and follies of the rich, and that he was haunted by the image of the poor man in the stocks. Kiernan thinks that Shakespeare's tragic vision > must have started from something personal, some dislocation of his own life... which opened his eyes wider to the world round him and to its martyrdom. Kiernan's assumption results in social interpretations. In the harsh world of *King Lear*, Kiernan sees a reflection of the ruthlessness of the Jacobean age. An older, more stable age has passed, and now 'men are as the time is', pitiless and self-seeking. He argues that although the play shows very little of the hungry poor, and nothing of riotous crowds, > Shakespeare works on our imagination instead, keeping the poor an invisible but compelling presence... Shakespeare leaves us to hope that some day the masses will stand up for themselves. ### Feminist criticism Feminist criticism is the fastest growing and most widespread of all modern approaches to tragedy. It is part of the wider project of feminism, which aims to achieve rights and equality for women in social, political and economic life. It challenges sexism: those beliefs and practices that result in the oppression and subordination of women. Feminism reveals how gender roles are shaped to the disadvantage of women in family, work, politics and religion. It exposes the male prejudice that for millennia has portrayed women as different from and inferior to men. For example, in Shakespeare's time the pernicious views of John Knox, a Scottish Protestant preacher, expressed in his *First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women* (1558), were enthusiastically believed. Knox claimed that nature creates women as: > weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment ('regiment' = order, self-control). Feminist criticism opposes the maleness of traditional criticism which was written by men and which often stereotypes or distorts the woman's point of view. This 'male ownership' of criticism meant that it was men who determined what questions were to be asked of a play, and which answers were acceptable. In contrast, feminists examine how female experience is portrayed in criticism of tragedy, and expose how women's feelings and actions are neglected, repressed or misrepresented. Feminist criticism, like any 'approach', takes a wide variety of forms. Nonetheless it is possible to identify certain major concepts or concerns which recur in feminist critical writing on King Lear: * **Patriarchy (male domination of women).** For much of the play, Lear treats his daughters as subordinates who must obey his every whim. Like many other Shakespearean fathers, Lear is enraged when his daughters disobey him. Patriarchy is interpreted as the cause of the tragedy. At the end of the play all three daughters are dead, and women have no part in the new order which is uncompromisingly male. * **Misogyny (male hatred of women).** Male language frequently demeans women as for example when Lear threatens and curses his daughters. * **Sexual disgust.** Lear raves that the female genitals are the source of evil: 'But to the girdle do the gods inherit; / Beneath is all the fiend's. / There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit' (Act 4 Scene 5, lines 122-4). Women are the source of lust, and Goneril and Regan are destroyed by their desire for Edmund. * **Unnaturalness.** His daughters' defiance and resistance is seen by Lear as reversing the natural order of things (which he sees as female subordination and compliance to male wishes). He curses his daughters as 'unnatural hags'. * **Women as property.** Lear regards Cordelia as a possession, to be disposed of as he sees fit. * **Positive views of women.** Feminist interpretations of Goneril (and, to a lesser extent, Regan) find justification in their resistance to their father's selfish and oppressive behaviour. The feminist concept of 'sisterhoods of resistance' is sometimes used to describe how Goneril and Regan combine to defy Lear's authority. * **Stereotyping.** Feminist critics challenge the traditional portrayal of women as examples of 'virtue' or 'vice'. In arguing for equality, feminists demonstrate that Goneril and Regan are, like the male characters, complex and flawed, experiencing similar emotions to men and suffering like them. Feminist approaches to tragedy vary widely because there is of course more than one 'woman's point of view.' One feminist critic, Jacqueline Dusinberre, in *Shakespeare and the Nature of Women* (1975), claims that 'drama from 1590 to 1625 is feminist in sympathy'. She argues strongly that Shakespeare 'saw men and women as equal in a world which declared them as unequal.' Her views are echoed by others who argue that *King Lear* invites dissent from misogyny and patriarchy, and can be interpreted and performed in ways that expose patriarchy as vicious and unjust. But other feminist critics do not share Dusinberre's view. They seek to expose the misogyny and patriarchy that degrades women. For example Kathleen McLuskie argues that King Lear presents a conventional and conservative male view of the world, seeing it as a patriarchal morality play in which the female characters are either sanctified (Cordelia) or demonised (Goneril and Regan). She sees a 'mystification of the real socio-sexual relations' in the play, so that audience sympathy is manipulated to evoke compassion for Lear, despite the loathing he displays towards women. She concludes: > The misogyny of King Lear, both the play and its hero, is constructed out of an ascetic tradition which presents women as the source of the primal sin of lust, combining with concerns about the threat to the family posed by female insubordination. Such readings (like all critical interpretations) raise the question of whether they are what Shakespeare intended. Was he purposefully challenging female stereotyping? Whilst many critics today argue that Shakespeare's intentions can never be known, a distinctive feature of feminist criticism is to suggest that King Lear subjects patriarchal conventions to critical scrutiny, exposing them as irrational and repressive. ### Performance criticism Performance criticism fully acknowledges that King Lear is a play: a script to be performed by actors before an audience. It examines all aspects of the play in performance: its staging in the theatre or on film and video. Performance criticism focuses on Shakespeare's stagecraft and the semiotics of theatre (words, costumes, gestures, etc.), together with the 'afterlife' of the play (what happened to King Lear after Shakespeare wrote it.). That involves scrutiny of how productions at different periods have presented the play. As such, performance criticism appraises how the text has been cut, added to, rewritten and rearranged to present a version felt appropriate to the times. The first recorded performance of the play was for King James I at the palace of Whitehall, London, on St Stephen's Night (26th December), 1606. The play had almost certainly also been performed a number of times that year at the Globe Theatre on London's Bankside. The king may have requested a performance of this particular play because it portrayed the folly of dividing a kingdom (see pages 67-8) or perhaps it was chosen because its subject matter and themes were appropriate for the festival. The feast of St Stephen was celebrated by offering hospitality to the poor, and the set Bible readings for the day emphasised the need to be patient even in times of suffering. The play does not seem to have been popular. Only three other performances are known to have taken place up to 1681. In that year, Nahum Tate published his own radically revised adaptation, which was the only version staged until well into the nineteenth century. Tate's dedication to his rewriting of King Lear records that he found Shakespeare's play > a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished; yet so dazzling in their disorder, that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure... the method necessarily threw me on making the tale conclude in a success of the innocent distressed persons: otherwise I must have encumbered the stage with dead bodies. Tate's response to that 'heap of jewels' was to ensure that good triumphed unequivocally over evil. He ensured that the play really did end 'in a success of the innocent distressed persons': Lear survives and is restored to his throne, Gloucester lives, Cordelia and Edgar are virtuous lovers, the King of France disappears, as does the Fool (humour being judged not suitable to tragedy). Around 800 of Shakespeare's lines are cut. For 150 years audiences saw only Tate's version, and the major actors of the times such as David Garrick and Kemble were acclaimed for their performances as Lear. In 1823 Edmund Kean restored the tragic ending, and in 1838 William Charles Macready brought back the Fool (played by a woman). But the play continued to be heavily cut, and Victorian productions followed the fashion of the times for 'historical authenticity', which in practice resulted in spectacular sets suggesting ancient Britain, Stonehenge, or even Roman temples. A mish-mash of costumes sometimes conveyed the impression of Anglo-Saxon England. The twentieth century saw a return to much simpler stagings of the play. Although the tradition of extravagant productions lingered on, most productions no longer attempted to create an impression of realism. The influential critic and director Harley Granville Barker comprehensively rebutted the pessimism of Lamb (see page 85) and Bradley, who doubted the play could be effectively staged. Granville Barker's *Prefaces to Shakespeare: King Lear* gives detailed practical guidance based on his starting assumption about the play that Shakespeare meant it to be acted, and he was a very practical playwright. Granville Barker shows how the storm scene can make superbly compelling theatre, and how the Gloucester plot is a fully developed parallel to the main plot. Under his influence, Shakespeare's full text (usually a conflation of the Folio and the Quarto) was played with few cuts. Stages were cleared of the clutter of historical detail and illusionist sets and properties, and productions aimed to recapture the non-illusory conditions of the Elizabethan bare stage. That implied a minimum of scenery, scenes flowing swiftly into each other, and a concern for clear speaking of Shakespeare's language. *King Lear* has become one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed plays. Since 1945 there have been many more performances than in all the preceding 350 years. Space makes it impossible to detail the great variety of ways in which King Lear has been performed throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Lear himself has been played in any number of different ways: as an out-and-out tyrant, as a genial father, as coldly demanding from the start or as warmly affectionate. Peter Brook's 1962 Royal Shakespeare production was directly influenced by Jan Kott's bleak and absurdist view of the contemporary world (see pages 93-4). There was no hope of redemption or affirmation in Brook's vision. Nihilism and cruelty dominated: the servants who kindly help the blinded Gloucester were cut, as was Edmund's repentance and attempt to avert the murder of Cordelia. Paul Scofield's austere Lear seemed designed to resist audience sympathy. In the hostile universe Brook created, nature and the gods were clearly indifferent to human suffering. The audience's final view of the play was of Edgar dragging away the corpse of his brother. Antony Sher's dazzling performance as a red-nosed Fool for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982 received great acclaim, but some critics felt that his rapport with the audience diminished Edmund's role as the character who traditionally establishes a direct link with the audience. ### Psychoanalytic criticism In the twentieth century, psychoanalysis became a major influence on the understanding and interpretation of human behaviour. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, explained personality as the result of unconscious and irrational desires, repressed memories or wishes, sexuality, fantasy, anxiety and conflict. Freud's theories have had a strong influence on criticism and stagings of Shakespeare's plays, most obviously on *Hamlet* in the well-known claim that Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus complex. Psychoanalytic interpretations can often be seen in performance, when an actor's behaviour or style of speech hints at what lies behind a character's words. For example Judi Dench, playing Regan, stuttered as she spoke to Lear. Her explanation reached back into what she saw as Regan's early experience, interpreting her 'filial ingratitude' as a reaction against the parental tyranny she had endured. An actor's search for motivation, for discovering how a character comes to be as he or she is, frequently results in a form of psychoanalytic investigation (as indeed does much character criticism). *King Lear* dramatises some of the deepest preoccupations of the human subconscious. Its searing portrayal of Lear's irrationality, of fractured family relationships, and of different kinds of mental disturbance clearly holds strong appeal to psychoanalytically inclined critics. Norman Holland in *Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare* reports that Freud himself 'approached Lear as a child choosing the ultimate mother, mute Death', and notes that *King Lear* 'has evoked an intricate variety of psychoanalytic readings.' They include: * **Lear as old man and father.** He has been variously seen as an old man harbouring incestuous desires for his daughters, a father who 'eliminates his wife and marries his daughters', a sadist whose impulses make him a victim of circumstance, a neurotic who cannot tolerate delaying his gratifications, a schizophrenic and sexual fantasist. * **Lear as child.** Here, interpretations have claimed he is a child acting out his realisation that he is not omnipotent, a child troubled and confused by his parents' secret sexual life together (for example in his rage at being locked out), a 'child's orphan' (here Cordelia is seen as Lear's mother, nourishing him), a narcissist who wishes to become a child again and bathe in limitless love. * **Interpretations as myth, ritual or folklore.** The Cinderella-like quality of the play is often remarked: 'Once upon a time there was an old king with three daughters. The older two were harsh, but the youngest...'. * **Lear as sacrificial victim.** Lear's suffering is to redeem society's ills, and Regan becomes a 'castrator'. * **Sibling rivalry.** Lear's daughters and Gloucester's sons represent two aspects of the child: loving versus hostile, loyal versus cruel. Some critics combine approaches. For example Coppelia Kahn's interpretation is an example of feminist psychoanalytic theory. In her significantly titled essay 'The absent mother in King Lear, Kahn's endeavour is 'like an archaeologist, to uncover the hidden mother in the hero's inner world'. As such she claims that the tragedy shows 'the failure of a father's power to command love in a patriarchal world and the emotional price he pays for wielding power'. Lear realises at the end that Cordelia is the 'only loving woman in his world, the one person who could possibly fulfil the needs he has, in such anguish, finally come to admit'. She interprets the play as a 'tragedy of masculinity', and argues that in Lear's patriarchal world 'masculine identity depends on repressing the vulnerability, dependency and capacity for feeling which are called "feminine"". The interpretations listed above reveal the obvious weaknesses in applying psychoanalytic theories to King Lear. They cannot be proved or disproved, they neglect historical,