King Lear (Vol. 83) - Stephen Booth (essay date 1983)
Stephen Booth (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: Booth, Stephen. “On the Greatness of King Lear.” In William Shakespeare's King Lear, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 57-70. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Booth illustrates how the audience's original evaluations of the characters in King Lear are thrown into question by later events, a process that mirrors Lear's misjudgment of his daughters.]
To make a work of art—to give local habitation and nameability to an airy nothing or a portion of physical substance—is to make an identity. I have argued that King Lear both is and is not an identity—that our sense that it inhabits only its own mental space is countered by a sense that it and those of its elements that I have discussed are unstable, turn into or fuse into other things. The identities of the characters and our evaluations of them belong in the...
[The entire page is 6170 words long]
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