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| Question | Answer |
| Mack Maynard (Patience in adversity) | Views Lear as ‘Shakespeare’s more tragic version of the creature who’s fate it is to learn to love only to lose the loved one, and to reach a ripeness through suffering and struggle only to die.’ – This reflects the Christian teaching of patience in adversity |
| Cavell (Progress to redemption) | – If Lear progresses neither to redemption or despair the play could be seen to offer the paradox that ‘we can only learn through suffering (yet) have nothing to learn from it.’ |
| Maxwell (Religion) | Thinks the play is ‘a Christian play about a pagan world.’ |
| Danby (Following WW2) | Following WW2 reinterpreted the play in relation to his own society. He concluded that Lear and Cordelia should be reconfigured as ‘representatives of an ideal community,’ whilst Edmund Goneril and Regan were the ‘ruthless embodiment of self-seeking capitalism.’ |
| King James | Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power of earth.’ |
| Foakes (R+G) | Regan and Goneril are inadequately characterised if seen merely as wicked |
| McLuskie (Feminist view) | ‘King Lear reinforces patriarchy and a misogynistic view of women.’ |
| Adleman (Feminist view) | ‘In recognising his daughters as part of himself he will be led to recognise not only his terrifying dependence on female forces outside himself but also an equally terrifying femaleness within himself.’ Lear’s infantile nature could suggest effeminacy |
| Kiernan Ryan (Patriarchy) | 'King Lear makes it clear that love within the patriarchal family, however pure it seems, is doomed to be infected by domination, dependency, guilt and resentment.' |
| Foakes (Ending) | Although the ending of KL may seem melodramatic, (the sisters’ deaths) Shakespeare ‘had to find a way to have them die so that the last scene could display Lear with the bodies of all three daughters, destroyed by the process he started with the division of the kingdom.’ |
| Foakes (Nihilism) | An ethically nihilist play would leave one thinking that good and evil have no meaning. King Lear leaves us with a sharpened sense of the differences between good and evil, and lying behind that, of the difference between goodness and nothingness.’ Therefore in considering both Shakespeare creates meaning in comparing the two issues |
| Fly (No closure) | For many critics there is no way to look at the play simplistically as in either pessimistically or optimistically which for Fly 'promotes a distrust of all attempts at closure and a negation of the possibility of unity, coherence and resolution.’ |
| Mack Maynard (Auschwitz) | Argues that for a modern society ‘After two world wars and Auschwitz, our sensibility is significantly more in touch than our ancestors was with the plays jagged violence, its sadism, madness and processional deaths.’ |
| Holloway (1960s) | By the 1960s redemptionist readings were rejected in favour of emphasis on bleakness and despair. Holloway viewed it as ‘the universal disruption of nature, that descent into chaos which for millennia had been a standing dread of mankind.’ |
| Foakes (Pagan Gods) | 'Show no sign of being interested in human affairs and may not exist at all.' |
| Foakes (Violence) | 'King Lear depicts an authoritarian society that takes violence for granted.' |
| Jonas A. Barish (Kent) | Kent is the 'quintessence of a good servant.' |
| Danby (Cordelia as a martyr) | Cordelia is 'the perfection of truth, justice, charity.' |
| Bradley (Edmund) | Likened his character to 'that of a professional criminal.' |
| Foakes (Power, property and inheritance) | 'Edmund's challenge of Edgar's inheritance and and pursual of wealth and status brings out the obsession of power, property and inheritance.' |
| Booth (Fool) | 'Breaks out of every category in which he might be fixed.' |
| Anthony Curtis (Fool) | 'His dialogue speaks of a world of experience, not innocence. He has been played as a counterpart to Lear in age, and very much Lear's alter-ego.' |
| Foakes (Gloucester's blindness) | He 'gains insight in losing his physical sight.' |
| Cavell (Edgar's view of Gloucester) | 'Edgar wants his father to still be a father - powerful - so that he can remain a child.' |
| Harley Baker (Edgar) | 'A Christian gentleman in a pagan play.' |
| Foakes (The storm) | 'Mirrors Lear's inner turmoil and pushes him into madness.' |
| Khan (Cordelia) | Is both 'a substitute mother and a fantasy object of sexual desire.' |
| Marxist - (The play is often seen to reflect a transition from an old order to a new one) | 'An order collapsing because of its internal contradictions.' |
| Montaigne (Stupidity) | Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity. |
| Montaigne (Link to fool) | The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. |
| Montaigne (Kent) | Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness. |
| Machiavelli | 1. He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command 2. Men rise from one ambition to another: first they seek to secure themselves against attack then they attack others 3. The wise man does at once what the fool does finally |
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