Applying Michel Foucault's power theory in Shakespeare's King Lear

Abstract

Michel Foucault is a French postmodernist philosopher whose theories have impacted different fields of knowledge in the modern era. Foucault is one of the few writers who recognize the nature of power in social relations. Foucault views power as a dynamic relationship between discourses and subjects, produced by discourses dominating specific subjects or governing individuals' demands. Thus, the present paper aims at discovering the power relations in Shakespeare's King Lear in the light of Foucault's theory of power. Like Shakespeare, Foucault is interested in language as a human problem, and hence his dramas can be read as the study of the nature of language. In King Lear, the character's actions and reactions are apparent in words and sentences to reflect the powerful and powerless position. Considered in this way, King Lear seems to dramatize the words and sentences as a total discourse of power relations.