Lear, King | Stephen Greenblatt (essay date 1982)
Stephen Greenblatt (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs," in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990.
[In the essay that follows, Greenblatt compares a nineteenth-century account of a father's "subduing" of his infant son with the love-test to which Lear subjects his daughters.]
I want to begin this essay far from the Renaissance, with a narrative of social practice first published in the American Baptist Magazine of 1831. Its author is the Reverend Francis Wayland, an early president of Brown University and a Baptist minister. The passage concerns his infant son, Heman Lincoln Wayland, who was himself to become a college president and Baptist minister:
My youngest child is an infant about 15 months old, with about the intelligence common to children of that age. It has for some months been evident, that he was more than usually...
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