Lear, King | Kathleen McLuskie (essay date 1985)
Kathleen McLuskie (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare; King Lear and Measure for Measure," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Cornell, 1985, pp. 88-108.
[In this excerpt, McLuskie employs a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of King Lear, focusing on the issues of patriarchy and misogyny in the play.]
Every feminist critic has encountered the archly dis-ingenuous question 'What exactly is feminist criticism?' The only effective response is 'I'll send you a booklist', for feminist criticism can only be defined by the multiplicity of critical practices engaged in by feminists. Owing its origins to a popular political movement, it reproduces the varied theoretical positions of that movement. Sociologists and theorists of culture have, for example, investigated the processes by which representations...
[The entire page is 5972 words long]
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