Lear, King | Rosalie L. Colie (essay date 1974)
Rosalie L. Colie (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: "Reason and Need: King Lear and the 'Crisis' of the Aristocracy," in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, University of Toronto Press, 1974, pp. 185-219.
[In the excerpt below, Colie suggests that in King Lear Shakespeare dramatized the deterioration of an aristocratic, hierarchical social order as well as the decline in parental authority during the English Renaissance.]
No; he's a yeoman that has a gentleman to his son; for he's a mad yeoman that sees his son a gentleman before him. (3.6.12-14)
When every case in law is right;
No squire in debt, nor no poor knight … (3.2.85-
6)Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to … (1.4.140-1)
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in...
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