King Lear has been regarded as the apex of Shakespeare’s dramatic art since at least the start of the twentieth century. It is also the bellwether play that reveals a critic’s basic approach to Shakespeare and his relationship to his culture.

King Lear and the Theater

Almost nothing is known about performances of King Lear during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The play, acted at the royal court during the Christmas holidays in 1606, was presumably put on at the Globe a little earlier. A record survives of a provincial production in 1610. No further Jacobean-Stuart productions are known. The theaters, closed by the Puritans in 1642, reopened with the restoration of monarchy in 1660. Lear was performed in 1674 and again the next year. Presumably these productions reflected new trends in the theater, with an enclosed theater, a proscenium arch, and women playing women’s parts.

A momentous event in the theater history of Lear took place in 1681: the staging of Nahum Tate’s adaptation, The History of King Lear. Tate’s play reflected the sensibility of the period—the language of the play was modernized (that is, lost its density), plotlines were simplified, and tragic intensity was sacrificed for melodrama and sentiment. The greatest changes of all were at the end of the play: Cordelia survives to marry Edgar, and Lear is restored to the throne. Tate’s version prevailed for 150 years, Shakespeare’s not returning to the stage until the 1830s. Yet Shakespeare’s play was not unknown during this period. It was edited by, among others, Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and Samuel Johnson in 1765. Moreover, the faults of Tate’s version and the superiority of Shakespeare’s were addressed as early as 1711 in a Spectator essay by Joseph Addison. Johnson, in editorial commentary, suggested that Shakespeare’s play would be better if it punished vice and rewarded virtue (as in Tate’s play). On the other hand, Johnson gave vivid testimony to the power of Lear when he said that so much did the death of Cordelia “shock” him that he doubted he had reread the end of the play until forced to do so as an editor (2-3).

Johnson was troubled by the worst violence in the play and commented on it: “The extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes . . . seems too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition” (2). Charles Lamb, in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare (1811), also noted how “painful” the play is but mocked Tate’s version because it evaded the play’s horror. Lamb also thought that Lear’s grandeur could not be captured on the stage, saying of the character Lear that he is “essentially impossible to be represented on stage” (6). A. C. Bradley memorably took the argument further, saying that the “immense scope” of Lear “interferes with dramatic clearness” (247).

Nineteenth-century interest in Shakespeare’s characters also moved the focus of discussion away from Lear and other Shakespeare plays as theatrical productions. The same diminution of interest in Shakespearean theater can be seen in nineteenth-century criticism that takes the plays as projections of Shakespeare’s inner life. This latter tradition was given definitive expression at the end of the century in Edward Dowden’s Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875). Lear, written in a “mood of indignation” “with the world,” is answered in “the serenity of Shakespeare’s final period,” in which he wrote the romances. In several waves in the twentieth century, the strongest near the end of the century, Shakespeare was again viewed as a “man of the theater” (the phrase is from the title of a collection of essays edited by Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer), both as a man of the theater of his time and as dramatist who has never not been our contemporary. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), with an influential chapter on Lear, helped to translate the horrors of the period of World War II to Shakespearean theater.

For readers interested in the theater history of King Lear, the New Arden, New Cambridge, and Oxford World’s Classics editions of the play are good places to start. An extensive treatment of the subject is provided in Marvin Rosenberg’s The Masks of King Lear (1972).

Trends in King Lear Criticism, 1930 to 1980

During the period from 1930 to 1980, two broad interpretations of the play were prominent, both consonant with widely accepted Christian values and often overlapping one another. The “moral interpretation” traced in the play first moral error in Lear and Gloucester, then discovery of error and attempts at penitence, reform, and restitution. These moralizing accounts often tended to include some notion of the shaping hand of providence, even if by the end of the play providential design is not made manifest but only intimated. The catastrophic deaths of Cordelia and Lear were of course the poignant challenge to all such readings. The critics of this school who perhaps best summed it up are among its later exponents: Irving Ribner, in Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (1960), and Virgil K. Whitaker, in The Mirror Up to Nature (1965).

Providential readings were greatly bolstered in the United States by the approach to early modern literature taken in a work of British scholarship, E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943). British critics, such as G. Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire (1930) and Derek Traversi in An Approach to Shakespeare (1938), tended to see moral growth surpassed by spiritual triumph, and they tended to downplay the destruction that culminates in a world that is “cheerless, dark, and deadly” (5.3.264, in the New Cambridge Lear). Knight went so far as to say that Shakespeare celebrates in his later romances “the inner truth of the tragic fact” in Lear (“Myth and Miracle,” 1929). (The problem of how to set spiritual achievement in Lear in the wider context of the play was anticipated by A. C. Bradley, who, in Shakespearean Tragedy [1904], acknowledged a temptation to entitle the play The Redemption of King Lear but drew back to insist that in Lear “suffering and death do matter greatly” [285, 327].) Knight also offered a haunting variant reading in “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque” (in The Wheel of Fire). Noting “incongruities”—for example, Lear’s thunderous curses interspersed with averments of patience—Knight alternately identified the incongruities as a reflection of an imbecile universe and as the surface manifestation of an underlying serenity. The tone of King Lear has rarely been puzzled over so acutely.

Providential readings, both those tracing a moral pattern and those emphasizing spirituality, often (not invariably) saw specifically Christian perspectives in the play, though the play of course is set in a pre-Christian era. The fullest exposition of Christian references is provided by Roy Battenhouse in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (1969). The broad redemptive pattern mentioned above and innumerable allusions in the play relate the action to some of the most central New Testament texts, and the play often suggests Christian allegory, especially in descriptions of Cordelia’s sacrifice—her return to England to aid her father and, most crucially, her ultimate death by hanging. In what Helen Gardner, in 1960, and several critics thereafter called a Pietà (or a reverse Pietà), Lear holds the dead Cordelia in his arms when he enters for the last time. Critics differed not so much over the presence of Christian allusions as to whether these functioned together to provide an interpretive guideline throughout the play. Do they rather have only local value? Are they any more privileged than many attempts within the play to grasp for meaning in seemingly inexplicable circumstances?

No moment is more crucial to arguments about what the play affirms or fails to affirm than is the one at the end of the play. The deaths of Cordelia and Lear are alterations in Shakespeare’s sources, where the two survive. When Lear enters carrying the dead Cordelia, his hope is to detect her breath. If she breathes, “it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows/ That ever I have felt” (5.3.240-41). When he thinks she is dead, he asks in effect whether this is an “imbecile universe,” says J. Stampher in “The Catharsis of King Lear,” echoing Knight. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/ And thou no breath at all?” (5.3.280-81). With the great issues of the play hanging in the balance, the meaning and significance of Lear’s final words are impossible to interpret with confidence: “Do you see this? Look on her! Look, her lips./ Look there, look there” (5.3.284-85). Are these words of ecstatic joy, Lear’s response to a belief that Cordelia lives, or words of utter despair? If Lear thinks Cordelia is alive even though she is not, can his joy nevertheless suggest a spiritual dimension, faith in an afterlife, perhaps? Bradley was the first to focus sharply on the problem posed by these lines, and he offered and debated alternate possibilities; a succession of later critics continued the debate. Maynard Mack offered a summary and cautious adjudication in “King Lear” in Our Time (1965).

The main intellectual underpinning for Lear criticism through many decades of the twentieth century was the orthodoxy of the Elizabethan establishment as formulated and reformulated in the Articles of the Established Church and as summed up in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (the first four of an eventual eight volumes were published 1594). Hiram Haydn’s The Counter-Renaissance (1950) and William Elton’s “King Lear” and the Gods (1966) broke free of these confining structures and set discussion of Lear in the context of the intellectual ferment in early modern times. Marxist and Marxist-influenced criticism began to broaden discussion of Lear in the 1930s, responding both to the Great Depression and to such works as R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Lear criticism identified the old order of the play with feudalism and debated inconclusively the nature of the nascent forces. Later, the Marxist critic Arnold Kettle (1964) blended the “moral” reading of the play with a loosely Marxist one, identifying the main historical development with a growth in human consciousness, represented by Lear’s growth into a person alert to the plight of the vulnerable in his kingdom. More sophisticated efforts followed, influenced by such works as Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958). As Terry Eagleton explains, by the late 1970s, both the waning of leftist political forces and a general rejection of totalizing theories put Marxist criticism into eclipse (93). (On the later resurgence of Marxist criticism, see Marxist Shakespeares [2001], edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, including the introduction by the editors.)

Trends in King Lear Criticism After 1980

The social and political ferment in the United States, Great Britain, France, and elsewhere during the late 1960s and early 1970s registered on college campuses, on faculty no less than on students. Feminism and, later, gender studies, and criticism setting Lear in political contexts have made formidable contributions. While there is no intrinsic reason that gender and political discussions should have developed separately, for the most part they have.

Feminist criticism, concerned as it is with the suppression of women’s voices and women’s power, not unexpectedly gave attention to Lear and his relationship with his daughters. Janet Adelman’s psychoanalytically inflected interpretation in Suffocating Mothers (1992) approaches Lear’s response to his daughters as conditioned by male resentment against maternal suppression of male power, as well as by the adult male’s longing to regain the attachment of early childhood to the mother. (Fear of dependency in Lear is a theme of Stanley Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear” [1969], a discussion that has had wide influence.) Adelman traces not only Lear’s rage and anger but also Gloucester’s more obliquely expressed desire to alienate himself from the feminine. Adelman notes Lear’s longing, early in the play, to become dependent on Cordelia as on a mother, as well as his later powerful if tentative wish to accept the maternal in himself. The critic traces Lear’s efforts to make amends to Cordelia and his quasi-incestuous longing for her. Adelman notes, moreover, that Cordelia—or her creator, Shakespeare—diminishes her humanity so that she can meet Lear’s needs. Adelman argues that the reader does not fault Lear because the reader, whether male or female, shares Lear’s conflicted feelings toward the maternal. Adelman explores the psychological distortions of the male power structure without seeing the play as condemning it, and some other feminist criticism takes a similar tack with Lear. Coppélia Kahn connects the overbearing patriarchy of the play with the strengthening of patriarchal control in the early seventeenth century, as discussed by, among others, the historian Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977). Kathleen McCluskie, in “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare” (1985), finds a still darker view of patriarchy in the play, though she argues that a modern audience can observe in the play not only the abuses of patriarchy but also forces that may alleviate them, such as the contractual limitations on patriarchal power.

Some recent criticism of Lear may be approached through two schools of historical criticism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Both these schools differentiate themselves from earlier kinds of historical criticism, which they view as limited by a concern with history and with historical sources as mere background for literature. The newer schools seek to interpret literature by seeing it in history, shaped by and shaping all forms of a culture. The early development of cultural materialism can be traced to Great Britain and an effort to connect scholarship with leftist political engagement. The new historicism, which has its origins in the United States, has been concerned not with political activism but, in a sense, the reverse: the study of the past in a way that alerts the reader to the pastness of the past and to the limitations of reading the past through the present.

The new historicism and cultural materialism have converged on a problem of interpretation that greatly affects the study of Lear: Do the canonical literary texts of the early modern period support the status quo in England during the period, or are they critical of it? The cultural materialists ask the question because of its relevance to their political concerns. The interest of the new historicists in the question is perhaps adventitious, arising from the attempt by several scholars, especially Stephen Greenblatt (in, for example, “Invisible Bullets” [1981]), to show that while the literature may seem subversive of authority when read from an untutored modern vantage point, when an earlier sense of form is recaptured, subversion is often seen to be contained.

The most noted cultural materialist reading of Lear is that by Jonathan Dollimore, who, in Radical Tragedy (1984), dismantles the moral and spiritual Lear discussed above. In tracing the growth of Lear and Gloucester, Dollimore notices that the loss of power is the condition the play sets for their growth. Moreover, the moral and spiritual insights of these characters occur fitfully and have no role in the struggle for power or in the final configuration of forces at the play’s close. Calling his “a materialist reading” (195), Dollimore says that the play “makes visible social process and its forms of ideological misrecognition” (191). Lear is “about power, property, and inheritance” (197). Even Edmund’s seeming philosophy of nature merely rationalizes his struggle for land and position.

Dollimore’s reading of Lear is a subversive one in that it exposes the mystifications advanced to justify power. Annabel Patterson, in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989), and Margot Heinemann, in “’Demystifying the Mystery of State’” (1992), offer views of the play that complement one another, both emphasizing subversion in the play. They set Lear in the context of the early years of King James’s rule in England and the contention within Parliament that raised fundamental questions about power and justice, especially economic justice. Heinemann mentions the “clash of ideologies” in the period:“bastard-feudal, politique, scientific-Machiavellian, republican, radical-puritan, crusading and anti-clerical” (76). She also discusses the religious and political dissent in the period that moved to the forefront of discussion when, decades later, civil war approached. Both Patterson and Heinemann trace developments from the Middle Ages on that challenged authority, for example, in comedy, satire, fooling, and Lollardism. Patterson sees in the play “an emergent structural analysis of power and class relations” (112) and “a critique of the socioeconomic system of Jacobean England” (108).

Whereas Dollimore (as we have seen) believes that Lear’s and Gloucester’s discoveries are rendered insignificant because they are shown to be without political effect, Patterson and Heinemann argue that these discoveries are too thorough, moving, and articulate not to constitute a formidable challenge to the orthodoxies of church and state in Shakespeare’s England. Moreover, the play makes a coordinated challenge to quietism. Cornwall’s servant kills Cornwall in an attempt to prevent his blinding of Gloucester—“a peasant stand up thus!” is Cornwall’s outraged response (3.7.79). In the Quarto text of the play, other servants express sympathy for Gloucester and an intention to aid him. Many of the themes on which the Fool touches are related to hot-button issues of early Jacobean England, such as the Crown’s awarding of monopolies (mentioned in the First Quarto but not in the Folio). Patterson does not assert that the play is subversive from start to finish. She observes, for example, that the play retreats into “subjective concerns” (116). She speculates that this may have been a cautionary move on Shakespeare’s part. Patterson and Heinemann place Lear amid early Jacobean discourses of power and observe ways in which the play leaves open audience response and interpretation. Both critics note the acting of Lear at court in 1606.

In “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” (1985), a celebrated essay of the new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt discusses a long-recognized source for Edgar’s performance as Poor Tom possessed by spirits, Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603). Greenblatt’s goal is to go beyond mere cataloging of echoes to explore how Harsnett’s work changes form in Lear. Noting that Catholics turned exorcism into performance in order to give charismatic power to the Catholic Church and that Harsnett exposed exorcism as fraudulent in order to pass charisma to the established church and state, Greenblatt asks where Poor Tom’s performance of possession moves charisma. In light of Greenblatt’s tendency to see containment prevail over subversion, we might expect him to argue that the play supports Harsnett’s conservatism, and some critics have so interpreted him in this essay. They may be right. However, the main emphasis of his argument seems to be that Lear offers no charismatic authority but rather hollows out all structures of belief. To the question asked in the play, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.6.34), the play gives no answer, Greenblatt claims. As an interpretation of Lear, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” is best considered a subversive reading with a distinctive focus on demonic possession and exorcism.

A historical question about Lear that critics have addressed is whether the play is set at a transition point from one form of social, economic, and political organization to another. Judy Kronenfeld, in “King Lear” and the Naked Truth (1998), lists the various ways in which the transition has been identified: “feudal to bourgeois, subsistence to commercial, Christian to capitalist, Hookerian [the adjective formed from the proper name Richard Hooker] to Hobbesian, ‘moral economy’ to ‘possessive individualism’” (235). Criticism that takes one of these historical approaches compares an emergent set of values with an older, community-oriented set that had endured over centuries. After early Marxist criticism the issue entered the mainstream of Lear criticism with a contribution by John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (1948). (This book itself influenced Marxist criticism.) A more recent effort is Hugh Grady’s Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf (1996). Historical schemes tantalize but have proven difficult to formulate in convincing ways. “Bad” characters in the play include ones as different as Edmund on one hand and Goneril and Regan on the other. In bold, clear voice, Edmund expresses in his soliloquy beginning “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (1.2.1) a philosophy of nature that aligns him with a form of early modern individualism, but no philosophizing of any kind accompanies the aggression of Goneril and Regan. These two sisters evoke little if any sympathy, whereas, critics argue, Edmund has legitimate grievances related to his illegitimacy, and he at times draws an audience with his charm, audacity, and manipulative power. Whereas the old order in the play can be identified in terms of an order that existed in English history, no new order emerges; a new order, if in the offing, is still inchoate.

The Texts of King Lear

Criticism has for several decades given extensive attention to the nature of the two texts of Lear that may make a claim to authority, the First Quarto of 1608 and the Folio text of 1623. The Folio both drops lines and adds lines; in total length it is about two hundred lines shorter than the Quarto. Prior to the the mid-1970s, commonly editors printed and critics analyzed a conflated text. In 1978, Michael J. Warren argued in “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar” that a conflated text errs on two counts. First, alternate versions of certain passages exist in the two texts, so that inclusion of these passages from both texts creates redundancy. More central to Warren’s purposes is his argument that the Quarto was based on an earlier writing of the play, the Folio on a later one, so that the two texts are distinct plays and should not be conflated. Warren’s two-text hypothesis is discussed by contributors to The Division of the Kingdoms (1983), edited by Gary Taylor and Warren, and is quite widely accepted, but not without qualification. R. A. Foakes argues, both in the New Arden Lear (1997) and in “The Reshaping of King Lear” (2008) that both printed texts are stages in an evolving text and that the later printed text, though possessing significant differences, does not involve a fundamental reworking of the earlier one. By comparing excerpts, some in facsimile, from the two texts, Jay L. Halio, in his New Cambridge King Lear (1994), clarifies the differences between the two texts (see “Textual Analysis,” parts 1 and 2 [58-89 and 265-91]).

Among the differences between the texts is the omission from the later text of a major part of act 3, scene 6, including the “mock trial” to which the Fool, Lear, and Edgar (as Poor Tom) contribute. Albany is a stronger character in the Quarto than in the Folio, while only in the Folio does Edgar gain such stature that he can speak the final lines of the play, apparently in preparation to assume rule. Many other variations between the texts affect the presentation of major as well as minor characters. Other alterations may reflect changes in dramatic fashion, contemporary concerns, and political pressures.

Some editions of Shakespeare’s complete works, such as The Norton Shakespeare, print both texts of Lear and a conflated text as well. Several editions of the texts in parallel have been published; for example, in King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition (2009), edited by René Weis, the two texts appear on facing pages, with annotation appropriate to each text. Jay L. Halio’s Lear in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series is based on the Folio; Halio gives the Quarto Lear in the New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos series. R. A. Foakes offers a conflated text in the New Arden (Third Series) King Lear, and Stanley Well provides the Quarto text in the Oxford World’s Classics King Lear.

Works Cited