King Lear Critics

• Knott - 'all bonds, all laws, whether divine natural or human, are broken... social order crumbles into dust'
• Lynn - 'Women overwhelmingly have been presented as evil vixens or innocent virgins'
• Elton - Cordelia is 'defined as a Christ-like figure, therefore her downfall is a direct representation of a godless society'
• Kettle - 'Lear's madness is not such a breakdown as a breakthrough, it is necessary'
• Orwell - The fool is 'like a trickle of sanity running through the play'
• Draper - 'chaos from conflict of authority is the very essence of the play'
• Kahn - 'Lear's inability to accpet dependence on his daughters drives him mad'
• McCluskie - 'we are forced to sympathise with Lear, the symbol for patriarchy, as a victim of his daughters' actions'
• Brandes - Cordelia is 'the living emblem of womanly dignity'
• Psychoanalytical criticism - considers the influence of repressed and unconscious desires on personality. Lear unconscious desire to be mothered by Cordelia, 'unburdened crawl'
• Feminist criticism - end of the play marks the death of all female characters, new order entirely male. Perhaps this suggests the society is better off without women.
• Johnson - 'a play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous mscarry'
• 'monstrously unjust'
• Marxist lens - 'Edmund typifying the new bourgeois ethic of individual materialism'
• Malcontent - 'both the victims and agents of social corruption'
• Exposure is the very essence of King Lead
• Elton - ‘the last act shatters the foundations of faith itself’
• the Fool is “Lear’s alter ego, his externalized conscience”