An Essay on King LearCambridge University Press, 1974 M04 25 - 192 pages Professor Goldberg offers a reading of King Lear that avoids the pitfall alternatives of idealism, moralism, absurdism, and redemptionist sentimentality. He sees the play as a challenge to our moral sense and our need for a feeling of natural justice, but as undercutting all easy answers. That it does not permit them is one of its main points. The essay traces a developing response to the whole of the action as it proceeds, making no premature judgments. It springs from a considered sense of what a poetic drama is and how it works: especially how it presents 'character' and how the views of the characters relate to the whole intention of the play and the author's own vision of life. Many readers are likely to think this the most satisfactory attempt they have yet read to do justice to this great play; because Professor Goldberg responds to it with intelligence and sensitivity, because he does not impose a ready-made meaning on it, and because he has thought about Shakespearean drama in a way which makes this brief book a distinct stage in the history of criticism since Bradley and Wilson Knight. |
Contents
Introduction page I | 7 |
Sight vision and action | 34 |
The minor characters | 68 |
Lear and true need | 103 |
Answering and questioning | 133 |
Speaking what we can | 155 |
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Common terms and phrases
A. C. Bradley acknow acknowledge Albany Albany's Alfred Harbage ambiguity answer Antony and Cleopatra basic bear blinding Bradley Bradley's capacity character clearly conception consciousness Cordelia Cordelia's death Cornwall course critics daughters deny dramatic reality Edgar Edmund embodied endure equally essentially everything example fact fear feel final Fool force forgive foul fiend George Orwell Glou Gloucester Gloucester's gods heart hero human experience ibid identity imagination impulse insight John Danby Johnson justice Kent kill kind King Lear L. C. Knights Lear's less matter meaning merely moral nature objective obviously pain particular patience perhaps pity play play's possibility question realize reconciliation scene revealed seems sense Sewell Shakespeare Shakespearean tragedy simply speak speech spirit storm-scenes suffering surely thing thou thought tion true need truth trying values vex'd vision vulnerability Wheel of Fire whole wholly Wilson Knight words