Lear, King | Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner (essay date 1988)
Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "King Lear," in Shakespeare: The Play of History, University of Iowa Press, 1988, pp. 89-118.
[In the following excerpt, the critics examine King Lear from a historical perspective, maintaining that the play subverts the conventions of pastoral romance through its setting in an unjust, feudal society.]
In his conclusion to 'Myth in Primitive Psychology' [Bronislaw] Malinowski draws attention to the development of specifically literary forms out of the cultural praxis of myth. 'Myth contains germs of the future epic, romance, and tragedy.… Myths of love and of death, stories of the loss of immortality, of the passing of the Golden Age, and of the banishment from Paradise, myths of incest and of sorcery play with the very elements which enter into the artistic forms of tragedy, of lyric, and of romantic narrative' (pp. 143-4). Gillian Beer has noted...
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