King Lear (Vol. 61) | William Zunder (essay date 1997)
William Zunder (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: “Shakespeare and the End of Feudalism: King Lear as Fin-de-siècle Text,” in English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, Vol. 78, No. 6, November, 1997, pp. 513-21.
[In the following essay, Zunder highlights Shakespeare's concern with the end of feudalism and the accession of James I.]
Shakespeare probably wrote King Lear in the years immediately following the death of Elizabeth and the accession of James I in 1603; and the play evinces a strong sense of an ending. There is, for example, Gloucester's speech in Act I, Scene 2, after the disastrous division—or, rather, non-division (I.1.126-38)—of the kingdom, Lear's banishment of Cordelia, and Edgar's supposed plot against his father. It is a speech in which Shakespeare connects a discourse of contemporary history with the discourse of the play. It is delivered partly to Edmund on an otherwise empty stage and...
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