Shakespeare's King Research Articles

Becoming Lear: Shakespearean adaptation and the memory of performance

This article analyses the modalities in which a performance of Shakespeare's King Lear structures two late twentieth century plays, Thomas Bernhard's Minetti (1976) and Enzo Cormann's Storm Still (1997). It argues that the memory of a traumatic performance of Shakespeare's tragedy enables the protagonists of these plays – both ageing actors – to negotiate their relationship with painful memories and tell their story within what looks like a ‘surrogate’ performance of King Lear. The article also addresses the issue of the intertextual status of these dramatic works, arguing that they seem to announce more recent engagements with Shakespeare in stage performance.

Identity and Transformation in King Lear: From King to Beggar

In Shakespeare's King Lear, the protagonist’s journey from powerful monarch to vulnerable beggar serves as a profound exploration of identity and transformation. This paper examines Lear’s metamorphosis, focusing on how his shifting sense of self reflects broader themes of authority, vulnerability, and human frailty. At the outset, Lear defines his identity through his royal power and relationship with his daughters, but his misguided decisions lead to his downfall, initiating a process of personal and psychological unraveling. The Fool and Lear’s madness serve as pivotal moments, forcing him to confront the discrepancy between self-deception and self-awareness. Stripped of his kingdom and family, Lear’s transformation into a beggar marks a profound shift in his understanding of identity. In the absence of external markers of power, Lear gains insight into his own humanity, recognizing the universality of suffering and the impermanence of authority. Ultimately, this paper argues that Lear’s tragic transformation is not just a loss of status but an awakening to self-knowledge. His death, while tragic, represents the completion of his transformation, as he gains a deeper understanding of love, humility, and the fragility of human existence. Through this process, King Lear offers a poignant meditation on the nature of identity and its complex, often fragile, formation.

Gendered Perspective and Tragicomic Anticipation in Shakespeare's King Lear

This essay examines unexpected tragicomic elements in Shakespeare's "King Lear". Traditionally viewed as a tragedy, "King Lear" features moments of redemption that blur genre boundaries. Drawing on Northrop Frye's insights and analyzing plays like "The Winter's Tale" and "Measure for Measure", the study highlights the pivotal roles of female characters in influencing the trajectory of their male counterparts. Such intersections suggest "King Lear" not only embodies tragedy but also incorporates reconciliatory aspects of tragicomedy, enriching its narrative depth and complexity.

Style, Ideology and Female Representation: An Ideo-Stylistic Analysis of Shakespeare's King Lear

Language use proclaims an individual's personality and socio-political scenario of a particular age. The present study critically analyses the language used by female characters in Shakespeare's King Lear. The data has been collected from the speeches of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia from the mentioned play. The study employs an amended research model, which has been devised by drawing upon Fairclough (2012) and Mills (1995) to analyze the data Ideo-stylistically. The levels of analysis include the word, clause/sentence, and discourse. The analytical categories used in the study include representation, a normative and Marxist critique of language, comparative degree, rhetoric question, metaphor, simile, use of weak form, exclamation mark, contrasted pair, and parallelism. It finds that no use of language is ideology-free and linguistic conditions are highly ideological. Change in linguistic form changes the function of language. The language used by Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia mirrors their inward and social reality. The study in hand is a form of literary, linguistic research. Besides, it contends that an individual's linguistic habit proclaims their personality and reflects the prominent socio-political tendencies of a particular age.

Shakespeare and the Ethics of the Global: An Interview with Preti Taneja

Abstract: A wide-ranging conversation among Joseph Campana, Ayesha Ramachandran, and Preti Taneja about Taneja's novel We That Are Young and its relationships both to Shakespeare's King Lear and to the themed issue's focus, "World, Globe, Planet."

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

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.

Roman walls in English Renaissance writing

In 1587, an anonymous author proposed to Queen Elizabeth I that Hadrian's Wall should be reconstructed. Elizabeth did not adopt this proposal, but it testifies to a growing interest in the Wall on the part of writers such as Camden, Spenser, Drayton and William Warner. This essay examines ideas about Roman walls in these and other texts, including plays by Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare's King John, where the city walls of Angers, originally built to protect the city against Germanic invasion in 275 AD and still partially visible, provide an ironic backdrop for the play's animus against Roman Catholicism.

Three Daughters, Two Stories, One Tragedy: Ownership and Incest in William Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

In Shakespeare's play, Lear links his daughters to British soil, making them his possessions. Seeing his daughters as owned things, Lear believes he can do what he wants to them. Subsequently, Lear crosses boundaries, namely in his "love test" where he expects competitive courtship behavior from his daughters. The father's peculiar actions and inappropriate conduct with his daughters carry incestuous resonances. These themes of ownership and incest are starker in Acres, specifically, when Larry rapes his daughters. Larry projects a wifely role onto his daughters by having sex with them. He then makes sex something daughters "owe" their fathers. This wifely role metastasizes so that, in the end, Larry's wishes transform his daughters beyond their role as surrogate wives into, collectively, a symbolic mother. With this metaphor, Smiley picks up on resonances in her Shakespearean source and extends this theme of ownership. Acres' blunt use of incest underscores the latent psychological effects suggested by Lear's possessive conception of parental roles. As a retelling, Acres posits that even the experiences of malevolent women require scrutiny through which their pernicious behavior can be understood.

The Metamorphosis of the Tragic Hero - The Greek Classical and Post-Classical Renaissance in Contention

Just as tragic heroes and heroines have been identified with different eras and cultures, the classical ideal of the classical and post-classical Renaissance will be incomplete if the concept of tragedy is not focalized. This paper, therefore, looks at how both periods delineated their tragic heroes, based on their actions portrayed in the plots of their plays. The paper, using textual analysis, provides extracts from William Shakespeare's King Lear, as the main text to present King Lear as the post-classical tragic hero. This is juxtaposed with extracts from Sophocles’ King Oedipus, as the main text, and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, as a hero supporting text to present Oedipus as the classical hero. Whereas textual analysis shows that the delineation of the tragic hero lies in the source of the tragic situation – the concept of hamartia of the classical period, the post-classical Renaissance period portrays the tragic hero on the basis of the weakness of character.

Catherine of Aragon's Letters, English Popular Memory, and Male Authorial Fantasies

This essay juxtaposes Catherine of Aragon's self-created reputation during the height of her influence as queen consort (1509–1525) with her representation in literary works written over fifty years after her death. I consider how Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newbury, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, and Richard Johnson's "The Story of Ill May-Day" preserve Catherine's reputation for being Henry VIII's pious, loyal, deferential wife and an intercessor for English citizens; yet these later authors are far less faithful to Catherine's measured tone, unsubordinated syntax, and familiar diction in her writings. Catherine's fictional avatar, Queen Katherine, speaks, instead, with subordinated syntax, elaborate rhetorical figures, and aggressive language whenever she intercedes for male commoners. The resulting, somewhat contradictory, representation of Queen Katherine speaks to an implicit contract by which later authors perpetuate Catherine of Aragon's reputation for being a loyal, decorous, maternal queen consort, even as their character, Queen Katherine, engages readers and audience with sensationalist speeches that speak to rhetorical and cultural fantasies in which a queen consort moves beyond the boundaries of decorum to save vulnerable English citizens.

Storm, Stress, and Solastalgia: Climate Change in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom

Climate change has become a major force in shaping human experience. Climate change affects not only the Earth's atmosphere, biospheres, glaciers, and oceans; it also affects our perception of humanity's role in the natural world. While the majority of the grand narratives on climate change is in the hands of scientists, the literary humanities have an important role to play in creating a forum in the English literature classroom for students to read fiction that stimulates critical thinking about climate change, its contexts and history, and the future. This paper examines literary trends that creatively explore and cope with the effects of climate change on society. While several literary genres directly address climate change, this paper will contextualize two examples of climate science fiction - Paulo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower – with William Shakespeare's King Lear, Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. These works address solastalgia, a neologism that describes profound sadness and frustration about irreversible changes to one's home environment and the feeling of powerlessness. Similar to the influential Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement in Romantic literature, today's environmental distress and human worries are reflected in genres like science fiction. Climate change fiction enables readers to process alarmist contemporary environmental issues by contextualizing the anxiety-inducing data generated by scientific research with the power of the human imagination and the emotional intelligence of reading fiction.

Studying King Lear: An Ecocritical and Ecofeminist Reading

This paper analyses William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear through the theory of Ecocriticism and seeks to understand Ecophobia—the fear of Nature. Lear's act of reducing Nature to an object through which he is deriving natural resources stems from his deep-seated animosity with the idea of women as independent entities. His feud with Cordelia and inability to see through the evil mechanisms of Goneril and Regan can be attributed to his unwillingness to surrender control of the land and to Nature. His failure to accept Cordelia's refusal to partake in his structure of power and authority can be read as his phallic anxiety in surrendering to Nature and women.

Heroes, Tyrants, Howls

In recent decades, the philosopher William Desmond (1951-) has offered both insightful readings of individual tragedies and a striking reformulation of old Aristotelian standbys like hamartia and catharsis. This reformulation grows out of his wider philosophy of the “between,” which stresses humans’ fundamental receptivity or “porosity.” For Desmond, tragedy strips away characters’ self-determination and returns them to porosity. The audience is returned to porosity as well, a process of exposure that can be harrowing, and at times leads to despair, but that can also lead, in Desmond’s take on catharsis, to a renewed sense of the worth of fragile beings. Both tragic “being at a loss” and catharsis are important for philosophy because they resist determinate conceptualization. Tragedy reminds philosophy of its limits, and it challenges philosophy to attend to the intimate and the singular. This essay situates, synthesizes, and extends Desmond’s many reflections on tragedy. It focuses in particular on Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear.

Performance, Annotation, and the Play of Interpretative Possibility: The Opening of King Lear

This article begins as a closeexamination of the contrasting ways in which a short passage from theopening of Shakespeare's King Lear has been explicated in modern editionsof the play. From this micro-study it then seeks to develop largerquestions about the current practice of annotation in Shakespeare editionsand to sketch some propositions about how certain problems might beaddressed.

Fruits of Duty: Honor in Shakespeare's King Richard II

Fruits of Duty: Honor in Shakespeare's King Richard II

His Belly, Her Seed: Gender and Medicine in Early Modern Demonic Possession.

This article reassesses the role of gender in early modern demonic possession from a medical perspective. It takes as its starting point the demoniac Richard Mainy, who in 1585 claimed to be suffering from hysteria. Best known for its influence on Shakespeare's King Lear, Mainy's gender-crossing diagnosis should be read in the context of the close historical relationship between hysteria and epilepsy. While medical historians have viewed hysteria as the key possession-related illness, epilepsy was equally important. Both were seen as convulsive illnesses caused by an excess of reproductive fluids. Emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences between male and female sexuality, this shared etiology underpinned medical approaches to demonic possession.

The “rule of three” and the “callback”: How Comic Form in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.1 May Help To Date Its Folio Text

An analysis is undertaken of the comic techniques employed in Shakespeare's humorous portrayal of a private language lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This reveals that this Folio-only Scene (4.1) teases and amuses by means of subtly and rhythmically combining several differing comedic modes and tactics. This combination makes its comic construction exceedingly complex. A private language lesson is also portrayed in Scene 3.4 of Shakespeare's King Henry V. There, just as in The Merry Wives 4.1, audiences meet incongruous misidentifications of only-apparently ribald bi-lingual cognates. The Henry V tutorial scene is however much less complex in its dramatic and comedic construction than the Merry Wives scene. It is next proposed that when he later revisited similar themes Shakespeare typically improved on his former handling of those materials. Combining that with the contrasting complexity of treatment in two similar tutorial scenes suggests that at least Scene 4.1 in The Merry Wives was composed later than Henry V, which would be in 1600 or later. This “corroborates” the proposals in other independent arguments to the same effect. There is finally a brief discussion of applications of the principle whereby probabilistic inductive arguments are bolstered when there is a “consilience” between independent lines of enquiry.

"So Distribution Should Undo Excess": Recovering the Political Pressure of Distributive and Egalitarian Discourses in Shakespeare's King Lear and Early Modern England

"So Distribution Should Undo Excess": Recovering the Political Pressure of Distributive and Egalitarian Discourses in Shakespeare's King Lear and Early Modern England

The True Love of a Princess as Seen in William Shakespeare's King Lear

The True Love of a Princess as Seen in William Shakespeare's King Lear

Law and Catastrophe in Shakespeare's King Lear

Shakespeare’s King Lear appears to reaffirm the importance of the law of civilization, because if we do not, then catastrophes like this tragedy take place. However, at the same time the play makes a reader wonder what happens when the law is not adequate to hold upright against the winds that blow when there is no thick forest of laws. The “scientific” work of Darwin and the “social Darwinists,” Europeans considered life in nature to be a fight for survival using “fang and claw” against all others - as Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall seem to be doing. Although this was preceded in Shakespearean times by a concept of civilization or society to be good while the state of nature was base or primitive in behavior that was far from the conduct sanctioned by religion. As depicted in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the base natural aspects of humanity exist in hell while the intellect that defines humans in the image of God, exists in heaven; thus, urging people to act rationally or more Godly, not basely natural. Incidentally, Emile Durkheim in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life put forth the notion that religion equals society - or that at least one function of religion is to enforce social mores, cultural behavior patterns or norms that together form cultures. Perhaps Durkheim may have interpreted King Lear as a representation of what happens when a clash of the norms of society and how humans act naturally occurs.