King Lear (Vol. 61) | Jerald W. Spotswood (essay date 1998)
Jerald W. Spotswood (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: “Maintaining Hierarchy in The Tragedie of King Lear,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 38, No. 2, Spring, 1998, pp. 265-80.
[In the essay below, Spotswood challenges critical interpretations which maintain that the play represents a challenge to social structure, arguing that King Lear upholds class boundaries.]
In tracing the theater's role in eliciting social change in early modern England, many recent critics have focused upon King Lear as a central text, citing the breakdown of authority and service within the play as evidence of its subversive force. For John Turner, Lear portrays a world that “collapses beyond repair,” and presents a prehistory in which authority and service “melt mystifyingly into one another.”1 Even Stephen Greenblatt, a forceful proponent of the subversion-containment model, concedes that Lear is Shakespeare's...
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