critics of lear

• Kahn says: 'Edmund is the most dangerous and treacherous of the characters. Yet, he begins from a cause that we cannot identify as unjust.'
• Lear's purgatory: 'to be a purgatory of the mind, of madness.'
• Lamar: 'the text is just the 'education and purification of Lear''
• Burns: 'it is easy to dismiss Regan and Goneril as mere emblems of female evil – the demonic opposites of their saintly younger sister, Cordelia.'
• Norris: 'Goneil and Regan's behaviour is not just 'personal sins, but an upsetting of civilised values''
• McLuskie: 'women's lust leads to chaos and corruption while Cordelia's virtuous and enduring love restores authority'
• Bruce: ''you can be an angel (Cordelia) or you can be a monster (Goneril and Regan). There is no middle ground' when exploring the roles of women in this era.'
• Holbrook: 'Lear is 'boisterous, demanding, arrogant. He expects absolute obedience''
• Kettle: '"Lear's madness is not so much a breakdown as a breakthrough. It is necessary."'
• Bridie: '"In the first act, Lear is an arrogant old idiot, destitute of any decent human quality, and incapable of any reasonable act'
• Bradley: '"through his sufferings, Lear has won an enlightened soul'''
• Roche: ''Lear is meant to depict the plight of man before the Christian era, that is, before the salvation of man by Christ's sacrifice was available''
• Bradley: ''there is no supernatural justice''
• Dollimore: 'this is a 'play about power, property and inheritance''
• Bruce: '"King lear begins and ends with a fragile world''
• Tillyard: '"The Elizabethans believed in an ideal order…they were terrified lest it be upset."'
• Danby: 'Leah dramatizes the meaning of nature'
• Foakes: 'argues that 'suffering' offers a 'spiritual journey''
• Foakes: ''the play registers the anguish of the suffering brought about by the inhumanity of man''
• Foakes: 'states that the text is 'unsparing in its depiction of human cruelty and misery''