SOURCE: Levin, Richard. “King Lear Defamiliarized.” In “Lear” from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten, pp. 146-71. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997.

[In the following essay, Levin summarizes critical approaches to King Lear from 1960 to 1984, citing Marxist, feminist, and new historicist—as opposed to formalist—interpretations of the play.]

We exist, it turns out, within a single broad universe of discourse and we now have some assurance that the [King Lear] each of us sees is, in some important particulars, the same play.

—Lawrence Danson (1981) 3

Greenblatt's King Lear is, in many ways, perfectly recognizable: good and evil are not in question; … nor is there any question of the human desires that the play engages.

—Jonathan Goldberg (1987) 243

Someone who has not kept up with current critical trends may have to be told that the statement in my second epigraph is meant to be an attack on Stephen Greenblatt's reading of King Lear. There was a time, not so long ago, when the most devastating thing one could say about an interpretation of a literary work was that it rendered the work unrecognizable, but now this is considered a very desirable or even essential thing to do, as evidenced by the number of recent critics who announce that their purpose is to “defamiliarize” or “estrange” the text (no longer a work) by reading it “against the grain” or words to that effect.¹ It follows, therefore, that any interpretation that leaves the text perfectly recognizable has failed to do its job.

This complete reversal of the grounds of praise and blame is the result of a revolution in the assumptions about literature and criticism that has taken place in the British and American academy. Before this revolution the field was dominated first by what are now called the old historicists and then by the formalist New Critics, and while these two groups disagreed on many things, they inhabited what Danson, in my first epigraph, refers to as “a single broad universe of discourse” and shared certain basic beliefs: that the meaning of a work is determined by the author's intention; that authors usually want their intended meaning to be grasped by the audience and the audience usually can grasp it; and, therefore, that when a consensus has developed over the years about the meaning and effect of a work, it is probably right and radical departures from it are probably wrong. These assumptions underlie Danson's statement, which is taken from his introduction to a collection of essays on King Lear; he is pleased, and thinks the other contributors will also be pleased, that despite the differences in their interpretations, the play that emerges from them is still recognizable as “the same play”. Since then, however, the newer critical approaches have, in their own terminology, “put in question” these assumptions, which means putting them out of the question, and this has shattered the old “universe of discourse” and led to the opposite viewpoint represented by Goldberg, who censures interpretations that give us “the same play.” The fact that his statement appeared only six years after Danson's is some indication of how fast and how far we have traveled.²

We should not overstate the homogeneity of the period before this revolution, which is a common tendency found both in those who long to return to it and therefore idealize it and in those who reject and demonize it. Although the mainstream of literary criticism was dominated by the old historicists and then the New Critics, there were always some other schools, such as the Freudians and Marxists, operating in the margins. Moreover, in Shakespeare studies (and in other fields as well) each of the two dominant schools had within it an approach—I name them the “ideas-of-the-time” approach and the “ironic” approach, respectively—that opposed the consensus on many plays, usually by arguing that the apparently sympathetic characters are really meant to be unsympathetic.³ We must also remember that no consensus ever developed on the meaning or effect of some of his plays, such as the so-called “problem comedies” (which is why they are so called). But for most of them we did have a general agreement on the two basic points that Goldberg foregrounds: the judgment of “good and evil” in the play and the emotions that “the play engages.”

This was certainly true of King Lear, where the moral status of the characters and the emotions they are meant to evoke seemed perfectly obvious (in fact some critics complained that these are too obvious). Everyone recognized that Cordelia, Edgar, Kent, and the Fool are good people who are supposed to win, and do win, our complete sympathy; that Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, and Oswald are wholly evil and wholly antipathetic; and that the protagonists of the two plots, Lear and Gloucester, are not evil but make terrible mistakes and as a result must undergo great suffering, which again evokes our sympathies. The anthologies and surveys of Lear criticism published between 1960 and 1984 show that this basic moral ground of the play was never “in question,” as Goldberg puts it.⁴ This does not mean that there was no disagreement among the critics. They argued about the motivation of Albany (which involves the problem of the two texts) and the disappearance of the Fool, about the interpretation of difficult scenes such as the initial love test and Gloucester's attempted suicide, about the roles of imagery and allegory, and many other aspects of the play; thematic critics differed on the identity of its “central theme”; and there was a prolonged debate between those who felt that the play presents a redemptive, often Christian, view of the world and those who felt that its view is bleak or even nihilistic, with various intermediate positions. But these disagreements seemed so important at the time only because they occurred within a general agreement on the basic moral values of the play. The “ideas-of-the-time” critics did not claim that the Jacobean judgment of the characters was radically different from our own; Harold Goddard and Roy Battenhouse, probably the foremost ironizers of Shakespeare, did not find any ironic subtext here that subverted this judgment; and Jan Kott's “King Lear or Endgame,” which created such a stir when it appeared, only argued for an extreme nihilistic view of the play's world, at the opposite pole from Goddard and Battenhouse, without questioning the definition of good and evil characters or our emotional engagement with them.

A comparison of Kiernan Ryan's anthology and Ann Thompson's survey of Lear criticism with those published up to 1982 demonstrates that we no longer have this consensus, but we must not assume that all the new readings of the play reject it completely or that they form another consensus. Our present critical scene is even less homogeneous than the old one, since there is no single dominant school. The new hegemony in Shakespeare studies is divided among three major schools of criticism—Marxism, or cultural materialism; feminism; and new historicism—and the situation is further complicated because of overlapping and because some of these schools have gone through important changes or subdivisions, even within the brief period of their ascendency.⁵ For that reason I will not generalize about the new interpretation of Lear but will focus instead on a number of individual readings selected to represent the most significant trends. I should add that, while I try to present the main points of each reading accurately, it will obviously not be possible in my brief summary to take account of every aspect or nuance of the critic's argument.

The Marxist school of criticism, as I noted, was on the scene long before the recent revolution. During this earlier period, most Marxist Shakespeareans accepted the mainline assumptions about literature and criticism that I described but attempted to relate the plays to what they regarded as the major socioeconomic change of the time, the transition from a declining feudal society ruled by the landed aristocracy to the nascent capitalist society of the rising bourgeoisie. This approach is exemplified in Arnold Kettle's study of Lear, published in an anthology that was the Marxists' contribution to the quatercentenary festivities. He argues that the play presents two opposing concepts of nature—one expressed by Lear and Gloucester that sees nature as an organic whole of interdependent parts, operating on the human level in a “natural” network of reciprocal obligations; and one expressed by Edmund that sees an atomistic nature of warring individuals and regards the obligations of the other view as “unnatural” restraints imposed by convention on our “natural” drive for self-aggrandizement. These two views really are in the play, and Kettle's claim that they correspond to the opposing ideologies of feudalism and capitalism is quite convincing,⁶ much more convincing than his further claim that Lear's speeches about the plight of the poor and corruption of justice in 3.4 and 4.6 represent a “breakthrough” to a third alternative or “better way” that he calls “humanism” and identifies with “the democratic content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution” (168), which is embodied in Cordelia and affirmed at the end of the play in “a kind of utopian promise” (168, 170).

Someone whose knowledge of criticism is limited to the current trends may be surprised to find a Marxist praising “humanism,” since it is a dirty word in the new Marxist vocabulary, as we will see, but Kettle is following the orthodox line of his day. Aleksandr Smirnov's book on Shakespeare, for example, which bore the imprimatur of what was then the only Marxist regime, asserts that “bourgeois humanism” was a “progressive” or “revolutionary” force and that Shakespeare was the “champion of [its] heroic ideals” but denounced the bourgeoisie when they departed from them, thereby demonstrating “the correctness of [his] basic ideology” (26-27, 92-93).⁷ Kettle goes him one better by arguing that the “humanism” of Lear “leads him to question the validity of property itself,” so that his “development is not at all unlike that of later seventeenth-century radicals like Winstanley” (167). Thus, although he denies that he wants to “present Shakespeare as some kind of ‘unconscious’ precursor of Engels” (166), that is what he does. But the attempt to co-opt Shakespeare by proving that his beliefs coincide with the critic's was not limited to Marxism, for most of the mainline critics during this period also engaged in it. Thematists found that each play's attitude toward its “central theme” was the same as theirs, ironic critics found that each play's subversive subtext embodied their own values, and this tendency can also be seen in the arguments about King Lear mentioned above: critics like Goddard and Battenhouse who claimed that it presented a Christian, redemptive view of the world clearly shared this view, and Kott saw in it his own skeptical nihilism. Indeed, Kettle's reading is like those of the redemptive critics, except that he gives Lear a Marxist rather than a Christian redemption.

A notable exception to this widespread tendency is Paul Delany's reading of the play. Like Smirnov and Kettle, he bases his analysis on the conflict between feudal and bourgeois values, but he comes to the opposite conclusion, for while he recognizes (unlike them) the complexity of Shakespeare's attitude toward this conflict, he argues persuasively that in Lear the “feudal-heroic values” are espoused not only by Lear and Gloucester, but also by Cordelia, Edgar, Kent, and all the other sympathetic characters, and that the play reveals its author's “nostalgia” for those values and his inability “to reconcile himself with the emerging bourgeois forces” represented by all the unsympathetic characters (439). He also demonstrates that Lear's speeches on poverty and injustice, which Kettle relies on to construct a third alternative, either “view social inequality from the traditional perspective” of an organic, feudal state or else revel in a nihilistic version of society, and therefore do not point toward bourgeois democracy, much less toward socialism (435-36). That presents Delany with a problem of evaluation, since Smirnov and Kettle and almost all other Marxist critics of this period find the value of the play in its “progressive” endorsement of the right (that is, left) side of this conflict, the side of the future; but he confronts this too and argues, in Marx's own terms, that a powerful tragic effect can be evoked by the representation of a declining social order (437). It is an impressive performance, marked by a sophistication and honesty that make it, I believe, the best Marxist interpretation of the play to appear before the critical revolution.

As I already noted, we must not expect that all readings produced after this revolution will break completely with earlier criticism or evolve from it in a simple chronological sequence. Kiernan Ryan's essay, one of the latest we will examine, follows the same basic scheme as Kettle's: he finds that Lear presents the “rival ideologies” of the declining feudal aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie and a third egalitarian alternative (68), located again in Lear's speeches in 3.4 and 4.6. There are, however, significant differences. Unlike Kettle and Smirnov, he does not relate this third position to progressive elements of the bourgeoisie or to any other contemporary force, but insists instead that it “reject[s] both the waning and the waxing world-views,” since both are grounded in a “class-divided” society (68, 71), and also insists that the evil effects of class division depicted in the play underlie “our own predicament” (66), so his analysis seems to float free of history. He also differs from them in claiming that the “causes” or “main-springs” of the tragedy are these “injustices of a stratified society” (71-73) and that the play gives us a “compelling dramatisation” of this causal connection that “leaves us no choice” but to “seek the implied solution” in the third alternative, a classless society (66, 72). But in fact all the tragic actions involve relations between members of the ruling class, so it is hard to see how they can be caused by class divisions, and it is even harder to see how the play's lesson on the evils of class division can be so compelling when Ryan complains that previous critics failed to notice it (66-67), which looks like a paradox. Actually no one has noticed this lesson except Marxists who already know it and bring it with them to the play. Ryan praises Lear for its educational value, but apparently this is limited to preaching to the converted.

At first glance Margot Heinemann's essay seems to be more historically specific, for much of it is devoted to the relationship of Lear to the conflict between King James and Parliament and to other contemporary issues. But her conclusion is similar to Ryan's, since she states that “the causes of disaster lie” in “the horror of a society divided between extremes of rich and poor,” which is the “central focus” and “central concern” of the play, and that the basic features of this “unjust society” are the same in Lear's world and Shakespeare's and in the England of 1990 (78-79), so they are just as unspecific as Ryan's “injustices of a stratified society.” Her account of the action is just as inaccurate as his, for the initial mistakes of Lear and Gloucester and the suffering resulting from them are not caused by, or even related to, the presence in the society of extremes of rich and poor. Her view of the play's effect, however, is different from his: she denies that it “propound[s] an ideal, simplified, harmonious solution for [its] conflicts” (76), which he claims it does in its “implied solution” of a classless society. Yet this turns out to be only a difference in degree, for she goes on to explain that the play is “demystifying the mystery of state” and so “empowers ordinary people in the audience to think and judge for themselves” about these matters, encourages the “resistance” of “the common people” to injustice, and even suggests “a justified popular rising” against it, through the “subversive” use of the “world upside down” trope (76, 80), so the play is teaching a Marxist lesson after all, although her version of it is vaguer than Ryan's.

My last two examples make a clearer break with earlier Marxist criticism, since they are influenced by the ideas now known as “poststructuralist theory” (or simply “theory”) that reject the old assumptions about literature. Thus in these readings Shakespeare virtually disappears and his activity is taken over by the play or “text,” whose meaning is not determined by his intention and does not reflect his view of society. The critic's focus, moreover, is not on that society but on “ideology” as redefined by revisionist Marxists like Louis Althusser, which means that the play does not simply affirm a set of conscious beliefs but does “ideological work” through strategies of which the audience may not be conscious. James Kavanagh, like most other Marxist critics, sees Lear as a “clash” between the feudal “hierarchical ideology” and the bourgeois “individualist ideology” (156-57), but unlike most of them he places the play on the side of feudalism, which was Delany's view. His analysis, however, is very different from Delany's. He does not account for the play's stance in terms of Shakespeare's feelings, which are irrelevant. More important, he sees the “egalitarian” ideas that emerge in Lear's speeches in Acts 3 and 4 (which Delany, we saw, had to explain away) as an “ideological move” to elicit sympathy for him and to make a “sharp criticism of the anarchic world of isolated, calculating egos that is the feudal ideology's image” of the “bourgeois ethic,” so that the play “appropriates egalitarianism,” which is an “element of bourgeois ideology,” in order to “incorporate” it as a “dominated element of a transformed aristocratic ideology” (157-58). He faces the same problem of evaluation as Delany, since he too locates Lear on the side of the past, but he solves it in a different way by praising the play's “fearlessness in representing … such opposed ideological elements” (159), which is a pretty daring “move” on his part (though he never explains how an inanimate object can be fearless, or why this is a virtue) that helps to make this, in my view, the most interesting of these new Marxist readings.

Jonathan Dollimore's essay also focuses on the play's dominant ideology, but he defines it as “essentialist humanism,” which is the “mystified” belief in an intrinsic and universal human nature. According to him, this is the ideology of the bourgeoisie and is closely related to “Christian essentialism,” the equally “mystified” ideology of feudalism (155-56, 194), so these two world views are not opposed in the play. The real opposition is between any form of essentialism or humanism and “materialism” (that is, Marxism), which is not an ideology, presumably because ideologies involve a “mystification” or “misrecognition” of reality, whereas materialism sees the truth.⁸ He claims that the play uses the materialist perspective to subject essentialist humanism “to skeptical interrogation” that “demystifies” or “repudiates” it by revealing that “human values” like kindness are “dependent upon” and “operate in the service of” the “material realities” of “power and property” (197-98, 202). Thus his version of Lear also teaches a Marxist lesson, though it is very different from the lesson found by earlier Marxists (in fact, we have come full circle from Smirnov and Kettle, who saw “humanism” as the hope of the future). The problem is that Cordelia, Edgar, and Kent never learn this lesson but go on being kind to Lear and Gloucester after these two men lose all their power and property (Gloucester also risks his life to help the powerless and property-less Lear), while the lesson is already known by Goneril, Regan, and especially Edmund, whose “revolutionary insight” leads him to reject essentialist humanism and so makes him the chief spokesperson for the truth (198, 201). This reading, then, seems to meet the criteria stated by Goldberg in my epigraph: it makes the play virtually unrecognizable by reversing our moral judgments, since the apparently good characters are wrong and the apparently evil ones are right, and by negating our emotional engagement, since we cannot sympathize with those reactionary essentialist humanists (Dollimore stops short of saying we should sympathize with Edmund, who is guilty of a “misuse of revolutionary insight” because he fails to “liberate himself from his society's obsession with power [and] property”—201). In his review of this book, however, Goldberg criticizes it for another reason; he says its analysis is ahistorical since the materialist “revolutionary” anti-essentialism it finds in Lear (and other plays of the period) is “unmoored” from the social context of Jacobean England or even of the succeeding bourgeois hegemony, so “the only revolution” it points to is “the one that Marx predicts and which has yet to arrive” (74-75). And he is right.

Although these new Marxist readings differ in many ways, we can note some general tendencies that most of them share. One is a tension (contradiction?) between their need to be “historically specific” by relating Lear to the conflicts of its own time and their need to be “relevant” by making it convey a message for our time.⁹ This accounts for the insistence in many of these readings that the social problems presented by the play are still with us, and that the solution for them recommended by the play is still the only solution for our problems—that is, socialism. Most of them, in other words, make Shakespeare or his text a proto-Marxist. They also locate the cause of the tragic actions “beyond the conscious culpability of individuals in the iniquitous structures” of society, as Ryan puts it (72).¹⁰ This in itself, we saw, need not seriously alter our judgments of and feelings toward the characters, although it tends to weaken those feelings and our sense of the play as a tragedy.¹¹ Moreover, it confuses a necessary condition with a sufficient cause. The society of the play, where kings and fathers have absolute power, property is inherited, and so on, makes the tragic actions possible, since they could not occur (at least in the same way) in another kind of world, but it does not cause those actions, since other people living in this society do not act in this manner; indeed all the witnesses to Lear's rejection of Cordelia view it as a shocking departure from the norms of their society. Finally, these essays tend to be highly selective in citing evidence. Goldberg complains that Dollimore “raids Renaissance texts; he does not read them” (75), and this is more or less true of the other critics, who seize on those elements of the play that fit their thesis and ignore the others (which is also more or less true of most non-Marxist critics). For example, they discuss at length Lear's attack on the corruption of justice in 4.6 but do not mention his attack on women a few lines earlier, which is apparently not relevant to the Marxist approach, although it is very relevant to the next one we will examine.

Unlike Marxism, the feminist approach entered the critical scene at the beginning of, and as a major cause of, the revolution I described at the outset. Many of the early feminist critics of Shakespeare adopt the methods of New Critical thematism in which they were trained; thus Marianne Novy sees Lear as a conflict between “patriarchy” and “mutuality” that serves the same function as the old New Critical “central themes” like “reason vs. passion.”¹² The play presents an “exploration of some behavior that patriarchy fosters in men and women” and an “implicit criticism” of it (150) by showing that it is responsible for Lear's mistakes and by having him learn, through suffering, the lesson Shakespeare is teaching—not a Marxist lesson on the evils of private property and the need for socialism, but a feminist lesson on the evils of patriarchy and the need for mutuality, which is embodied in Cordelia. This analysis leads to some real insights into Lear's psychology, especially his desire to be mothered by his daughters (152-53), and to an explanation of his misogynistic outburst in 4.6 (which the Marxists ignored) in terms of “patriarchal society's split of human qualities” into “masculine and feminine” and his urge to deny and project the feminine in himself by “scapegoating” women (156). Yet her attempt to blame patriarchy for his initial mistakes involves the same confusion of necessary condition with sufficient cause that we found in the Marxists and is open to the same objection—that all the witnesses see his actions, not as normal patriarchal behavior, but as a shocking deviation from it. While her reading does not violate our feelings for the characters, it dilutes them by focusing on the abstract thematic lesson. Indeed she herself shows a concern for this problem that is very rare in thematic criticism:

There is so much sympathy with Lear at the end that it seems cold to turn from feeling with him to any further analysis of the play in terms of sex-role behavior, but … part of the effect of the play is to impress on us the suffering created by these behavior patterns … in a patriarchal society.

(162)

Coppelia Kahn's reading marks a further development of the psychological side of feminist criticism found in Novy. It utilizes the feminist revision of Freudianism, associated primarily with Nancy Chodorow (1978), that like Freud locates the basic cause of adult neurosis in a childhood trauma, but shifts the site of this trauma from Oedipal relations with the father to pre-Oedipal relations with the mother, which are responsible for men's distorted “patriarchal” attitudes. From this it follows, according to Kahn, that “the imprint of mothering on the male psyche, the psychological presence of the mother in men … can be found throughout the literary canon” in the “maternal subtext” in male-authored texts and the repressed or “hidden mother in the hero's inner world” (35, 37). Her choice of King Lear to exemplify this theory is astute (like Ernest Jones's choice of Hamlet to exemplify Freud's Oedipal theory) since many facts of the play fit it, and so it enables her to explain, in greater detail than Novy, important aspects of Lear's psychology such as his infantile fantasies, his feeling of dependence on his daughters and need to repress this, and his rage when they fail him, although some of her accounts are strained, as we would expect of any attempt to find a single cause for complex human behavior.¹³ Another kind of problem is posed by her concept of Shakespeare's role, for he has apparently escaped unscathed from the trauma of being mothered and has no “hidden mother” in his psyche. He seems to be fully conscious of the unconscious operation of this male malady and is praised for his remarkable “insight” into how it damages the psyches of other men in his (and our) society (37), and how that damage can be repaired, which he demonstrates in “Lear's progress toward acceptance of the woman in himself” (46). Thus her Shakespeare, like Novy's, is teaching Lear and us a feminist lesson: the play becomes the “tragedy of masculinity … in a patriarchal world” (36) and the real cause of that tragedy is, once again, patriarchy itself.

Janet Adelman carries this approach a step further by applying it not only to King Lear but also to King Lear and Shakespeare. The basic term in her analysis is “fantasies,” specifically the infantile fantasies generated by “the immense fear and longing of a son's relationship with a mother” (103), but unlike Kahn, who finds these fantasies only in Lear, she insists that they “give emotional coloration to the entire play” because “they are not localized in (and hence limited to) any single character” (104). Thus, she can account for the role of Gloucester and the relationship between the two plots (106-8), which Kahn virtually ignores, and can also probe, at a deeper psychological level than Kahn, the significance of many aspects of the main plot, such as Lear's initial love test, the storm, and especially Lear's reunion with Cordelia and her death—all in terms of a “pattern of repression and return” of the fantasized mother (109). It is an impressive achievement, too complex to be summarized here, but the connections it establishes between the play and the fantasy are necessarily metaphorical rather than literal. To take one typical example, she argues that Goneril and Regan are “psychically generated by Lear's rage at Cordelia” because “they play out her abandonment of him” (118), yet that is only true in her fantasy logic of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The result is that most of the characters are seen not as individuals but as “representations” or “projections” of the fantasy. This also raises the problem of agency, since the psyche that generates or projects them cannot be Lear's and must be Shakespeare's. Kahn, we saw, never confronts this problem but Adelman does: she claims, like Kahn, that Shakespeare is criticizing the fantasy, but she also acknowledges that he is “complicit” with it (115-17, 124-25), which causes some confusion since at times we cannot tell if she is referring to Lear's fantasy or the play's or Shakespeare's, but it means that her Shakespeare, unlike Novy's and Kahn's, need not become a protofeminist teaching Lear the evils of patriarchy. It also creates a problem of evaluation for a feminist, but she confronts this as well by arguing that women can be deeply moved by the play since they too are complicit in the pre-Oedipal fear of separation from the mother, which is “prior to gender” (125-26). Because she is able to integrate so many aspects of the play in her interpretation while honestly facing the problems that it poses, I think her essay is the best example of the feminist psychological approach to King Lear.

Kathleen McLuskie represents the other major trend in feminist criticism—the “materialist” or Marxist approach. She begins by attacking feminist Shakespeareans on two fronts that she wants to connect: they adopt a “mimetic model” of criticism that treats the play as the expression of Shakespeare's view of life, which they “co-opt” to make him a feminist¹⁴; and they are liberals who think the feminist cause can be advanced without “fundamentally changing the material circumstances” of our economic system (89-91). She announces that she, in contrast, will “refus[e] to construct an author” behind the play and will examine the “strategies which construct [its] meanings” in its “treatment of gender relations” and the material circumstances underlying them (92). Despite this introduction, the reading of Lear that follows is in many ways perfectly recognizable, as Goldberg would put it, and even conventional. Her study of the play's strategies yields a perceptive account of its “tragic power” and the “emotional, moral, and aesthetic satisfaction” and “pleasure” it produces by evoking our “sympathies” and “complete engagement with the character,” so that in the final scene “the most stony-hearted feminist could not withhold her pity” (98-102). But she breaks from conventional criticism by insisting that we must “resist” or “deny” this pleasure because it “endorses” the play's patriarchal ideology and also prevents us from making a “dispassionate analysis” of the “real socio-sexual relations” in it (100).¹⁵ Thus, although she believes, like Dollimore, that the “material circumstances” of property and power are the “real” basis of human relations here, she does not claim that Lear is teaching us this Marxist lesson. Instead she constructs the play as the enemy of Marxism and feminism, since it conceals the truth through its “emotional power,” and she concludes by discussing ways of defeating it in performances that could make it “reveal” this hidden truth by “subverting rather than co-opting” Shakespeare and so “offer the pleasure of understanding in place of the pleasure of emotional identification” (103-6).

Ann Thompson is also a materialist feminist and also begins by attacking recent criticism¹⁶; but she limits herself to criticism of King Lear, and her principal targets, unlike McLuskie's, are male Marxists and new historicists, especially Dollimore, Greenblatt, and Tennenhouse, whom she accuses of “displacing and marginalising the feminine” in this play because they are “obsessed with power and property (120-22). When she turns to the feminists she criticizes both Novy and McLuskie, the former for her “apologist” defense of the play and the latter for her “radical” rejection of it (123). She praises Kahn's strategy of excavating the “maternal subtext” since it reverses that of the male Marxists and new historicists: “where they erase the women who are present in the text, [it] seeks out and reinstates the woman who is absent”: but she objects that, while “women are clearly present … politics and economics are largely absent,” as they are from the readings of Novy and French (124-25). What she wants is a “materialist feminist reading” that bridges the division between feminist readings focusing on the play's “personal level” and materialist readings focusing on its “political level” (125). She finds suggestions of such a bridge in Erickson's attempt to link his theme of “male bonding” to “paternal” concern for the poor, for here, very briefly, “a gender-conscious reading makes contact with a materialist or economics-conscious reading”; and in McLuskie's call for performances that would “subvert” the play by making it reveal the “material conditions” and “power structures” that determine family relationships (126), though we saw in examining Dollimore's essay that this “materialist” revelation only applies to the unsympathetic characters and is denied by the sympathetic ones. Yet this is all she can produce in her refutation of the idea that, in the criticism of Lear, “‘feminism’ and ‘materialism’ are mutually exclusive categories” (127).

Although she does not get very far, Thompson points to a major problem in feminist criticism of Lear (and of Shakespeare in general), the fact that much of it tends to fall into two opposing schools. The division she discusses between “feminism” and “materialism” is also a division within feminism itself—between the feminist psychological approach, which is mainly American and followed after the initial (also mainly American) thematic phase, and the feminist materialist approach, which is mainly British. The problem is not that feminist criticism is divided, for there is no reason why it should be monolithic, but that these two schools cannot relate to each other, because both the Chodorowians (like their Freudian precursors) and the Marxists claim to have found the one basic cause of all behavior, including the treatment of women, either in unconscious conflicts within the individual (male) psyche or in class conflicts within the socioeconomic formation. They are both totalizing systems, and there is no way to negotiate a compromise or reconciliation between them. Thus, it is not feminism and materialism but Chodorowian Freudianism and Marxism that are the “mutually exclusive categories,” and as long as feminist criticism is hung up on them it will be bogged down in this unproductive contest. Another major problem of this criticism involves its relation to Shakespeare's world. The thematic and psychological feminists ignore this, except for Kahn's brief historical digressions that seek to connect her reading to the alleged “reinforcing [of] patriarchy” and generational conflict in this period and the practice of wet-nursing (38, 41, 44),¹⁷ which will not work since Chodorow's theory of mothering is supposed to apply to any period. Marxist feminists have a similar difficulty: McLuskie also tries to historicize her reading by invoking Jacobean generational conflicts (103), but she is committed to the theory that superstructural conflicts of this sort are always determined by conflicts in the material base and that these “real” causal connections transcend history, for the laws of Marx, like those of Chodorow and Freud, are supposed to be universal.¹⁸ That is why nonfeminist Marxists asserted that the play's lessons about class and injustice are just as relevant today, and the same rationale underlies McLuskie's call for subversive performances of the play that will reveal its concealed truth about “real socio-sexual relations,” since she would not call for them unless she believed that this truth applied to our society as well as to Shakespeare's.

The relation of Lear to the society of its time is the main concern of our third school, the new historicists. They are called “historicists” to distinguish them from the ahistorical New Critical formalists, and “new” to distinguish them from the old historical critics, who viewed the history of the period as a factual context that is prior to and determines the meaning of the problematic literary text (which is related to McLuskie's “mimetic model” of criticism), whereas these new ones, at least in theory, place history and literature on the same level as equally problematic texts that construct each other. They must also be distinguished from the “materialists” since they do not accept the Marxist political agenda or the base-superstructure causal scheme (nationality is involved here again—most new historicists are American and most Marxists are British). Like the feminists (and unlike the Marxists) they entered the critical scene as part of the revolution described earlier; in fact their entrance is often dated by the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1980. It seems appropriate, then, to begin with his essay on Lear (1985), which Goldberg attacks in my epigraph.

The essay takes off from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, an exposure of Catholic exorcisms performed in 1585-86 that is the source of a few passages in Lear. Greenblatt is not interested, however, in using it for a source study or a study of topical allusions to this event in the play (two typical concerns of the old historicism), though he notes a “resemblance” between Edmund's persecution of Edgar and the Protestant persecution of Catholics (118). He is concerned instead with showing how the relation between Harsnett's book and Shakespeare's play figures in the “crucial institutional negotiations and exchange” attendant on the major conflict of the period, which he defines as a “sustained struggle” over the “central value system” and especially “sacredness” (103-4)—unlike the Marxists, who locate the major conflict in the economic base. He finds this exchange in Harsnett's treatment of exorcism as a theatrical fraud and the theater's appropriation of religious functions; but no “struggle” is involved here (Harsnett's struggle is with Catholicism) and the connection to Lear, when we come to it, is not clear. Edgar's demonic possession is fraudulent, as in Harsnett, but despite Greenblatt's claim that the Dover Cliff scene “stages” an exorcism and his references to unidentified “rituals” in the play, there is in fact no exorcism or any other religious ritual in Lear—indeed the staging of such rituals was apparently prohibited.¹⁹ He is more convincing when he moves to a more general level to argue that the play, especially the ending, is “emptying out” any “redemptive hope” in the supernatural (120). But this is, as Goldberg says, “perfectly recognizable;” it is the old nihilistic reading, exemplified by Jan Kott, which was ahistorical, and I do not see what historical basis it has in Greenblatt's concept of “institutional exchange” and “struggle” since no contemporary institution promoted such a view or benefited from it. He does return to this exchange at the end, but only to argue that the play still moves us today and makes us “love the theater” because it “creates in us the intimation of a fullness” of an age of religious faith “that we can only savor in the conviction of its irremediable loss” (122-23). It is an interesting idea, but it is not specifically tied to a historical period, since he never explains how this reaction differs from that of the original audience, or even to Lear, since it could be said of many other tragedies. It may be unfair, however, to fault the essay on these grounds, for its real subject seems to be not any particular period or play but the “power of the theater” (122).

Greenblatt wrote another essay on Lear (1982) that also begins with a historical event, Francis Wayland's account, published in 1831, of how he broke the will of his infant son by cultivating in him what Greenblatt calls “salutary anxiety,” but this has an even more tenuous connection to the play than Harsnett's book. He first notes the “crucial differences” between Wayland's society and Shakespeare's (96), and when he comes to the “significant continuities” between them in child-rearing, he first relates these to “the mode” of Renaissance drama or the “practice of tragedy” then, “quite apart from any specific content” (103, 106). When he reaches the specific content of Lear, he focuses on the love test, but this test, unlike Wayland's will-breaking, does not “cultivate” any “salutary anxiety” in Lear's daughters, so his discussion shifts to the anxiety in Lear himself that generates the test, although this anxiety is neither “cultivated” nor “salutary” and is not related to Wayland. The historical connection that Greenblatt makes instead is to the conflict between generations in Renaissance England as it is reflected in the “maintenance agreements” that anxious fathers drew up before transfering property to their children (110),²⁰ but even this presents problems because he recognizes that these agreements are “very far from the social world of King Lear” (111). Then in his final section he enters that world to give us a fascinating analysis of the love test in terms of the interplay of power, the need for love, and the limits of verbal representation—an analysis that leaves Wayland and those maintenance agreements far behind and is worthy of comparison to Adelman's ahistorical treatment of this same episode.²¹

The other new historicist readings we will examine are more history-specific and play-specific. Leonard Tennenhouse begins by defining the basic principles of Jacobean ideology—patriarchy, primogeniture, “the metaphysics of blood” (which confers “legitimate authority”), and the preservation of the purity of “the aristocratic body” from “pollution”—and then tries to connect them to King Lear. From this perspective it turns out that Lear's initial error is not in misjudging his daughters (this is not even mentioned) but in “dividing up the monarchy” and violating the “principle of primogeniture,” which is “the most serious assault on the principle of patriarchy” (137).²² (He never explains what Lear should have done instead, but presumably if he had given the entire kingdom to his oldest daughter, Goneril, all would have been well.) Similarly, Gloucester's initial error is not that he misjudged his sons' characters (this again seems to be irrelevant) but that he “disowned his legitimate son and declared the bastard legitimate,” for this introduces “pollution” into “the aristocratic body” and so is a “crime against patriarchy which explicitly challenges the metaphysics of the blood,” and which he expiates by losing his eyes, this being a “ritual punishment” wherein he “purifies the aristocratic body” (138-39). Apparently it does not matter that his purifying punishers are allies of the polluting bastard, or that they punish him, not for his crime against patriarchy but for helping Lear, which seems like a very patriarchal thing to do. According to Tennenhouse, this purification ritual leads to the resolution Shakespeare wants; namely, “the reassertion of patriarchy as a metaphysical principle” (140), which also requires Cordelia's death, since if she survived she would inherit the crown in violation of this Jacobean principle (141). (He admits that the resolution violates the Jacobean principle of the metaphysics of blood because the new ruler “is not, strictly speaking, a blood relation” of Lear, but his gender is more important since power must revert to “the patriarchal principle itself” regardless of “the individual who wields it” [142], so long as it is not a woman.) Thus he has the play teach a lesson that is the exact opposite of Novy's: for her it demonstrates the evils of patriarchy, while for him it demonstrates the evils of violating patriarchy. He also differs from her in rejecting our moral and emotional engagement with the suffering and deaths that teach the lesson, so in this respect his reading meets Goldberg's criteria. The justification for this, he assures us, is that our tragic response to the characters is a modern anachronism and that the response of the Jacobean audience (who viewed the play exclusively in political terms) coincided with his own reading, which was also a standard claim of the old historicist “ideas-of-the-time” critics.

Annabel Patterson begins with an even more specific historical connection of the play to James: she claims that the depiction of Lear in Act 1 “comes perilously close to presenting a fictional portrait of the king himself,” and that Lear's division of the kingdom is a topical allusion (in a “reversed mirror”) to James's attempt to unify England and Scotland (106-7), an idea associated with Glynne Wickham, who was an old historicist. She also claims that Act 1 “includes a critique of the authoritarian, patriarchal … theories of James himself” (107), which is the opposite of Tennenhouse's contention that the play endorses these theories. According to her, however, Shakespeare then “extend[s] topicality's range from the narrowly specific to the broadest and deepest of contemporary concerns” through “a critique of the socioeconomic system of Jacobean England” (108), which becomes a “structural analysis of power and class relations” (112). She rejects the view that this involves the transition from feudalism to capitalism and focuses instead on “the clash of human with economic values” (108), the conflict between the oppressive socioeconomic system and the “popular voice” of lower-class resistance to it, which she locates primarily in Edgar, who presents “the radical analysis that Shakespeare performed, in disguise, on the economic structure of his own society” (115), and in Lear, whose progress to this radical position culminates in his speeches in 4.6 (111-13). Thus her concept of the “popular voice” serves the same function as Kettle's “humanism” (in fact she connects it to “humanist values”—113), Ryan's “classless” alternative, Heinemann's “world upside down,” and Dollimore's “materialism” in enabling the play to convey the right political message. Like them she insists that this message applies today, since the injustices it opposes are “still at the heart” of our society (117). She differs from them, however, in finding that at the end Lear and the play “retreat” from this radical position “into the domestic and familial, as a shelter from sociopolitical awareness,” which is Shakespeare's tactic to “baffle” the enemy (116). She therefore has no coherent overall view of Lear, but gains an advantage over many of the Marxists since she does not have to distort the beginning to make it the result of economic injustice, or distort the ending to make it promise the elimination of this injustice.

Leah Marcus's reading is the most historically specific, since it claims that Lear was written for, and so is explicable in terms of, the court performance that took place on St. Stephen's Night, 1606. It thus belongs to the occasionalist approach, an extreme form of topicalism that also flourished under the old historicism, despite the absence of evidence that any play in this period was designed for a special occasion or a special audience.²³ Her case rests on two alleged connections between Lear and James that Patterson also touched on: he embodies some of James's faults and his division of the kingdom alludes to James's attempt to unify England and Scotland. For Marcus, however, this Project for Union is the focus of what she calls the play's “local” meaning, which she also connects to the Feast of St. Stephen because of its emphasis on “hospitality” and “charity.” In this context, she finds, the actions of Goneril and Regan would be seen as a violation of the festival and would associate them with English opponents of the Union, who were “hard-heartedly denying the nation's obligatory hospitality to the needy Scots,” represented by Cordelia, Edgar, and Lear himself, so that the play becomes “an extended political exemplum promoting charity toward the Scots” and “enforcing the king's arguments” for union with them (153-54, 156).²⁴ This could present a problem since Lear is also supposed to portray James's faults, but Marcus disposes of it in two ways: James's “tolerance of the play's critique” of these faults (which Shakespeare presumably foresaw when he wrote it for this court performance) is a “kind of forgiveness” of his enemies enjoined by the festival, and the faults are caused by his subjects' “inhospitality toward the Union,” which provides “an explanation of all manner of royal failings” (156-57), though it is hard to see how this explains Lear's division of the kingdom that James wants to unite. Her view of the play, then, is even less coherent than Patterson's; it is fragmented into a collection of separate and sometimes conflicting “local” allusions that are themselves questionable, for while she refers to the play's “insistent Stuart referentiality” and “intense Stuart topicality” and “striking localization” that are “almost inescapable” (151-52), she admits that all this could escape people seeing Lear at other performances (158-59), leaving us to wonder what “unlocal” meaning or survival value the play might have independent of the special occasion that is supposed to explain it. But that is a problem inherent in the occasionalist approach.

One conclusion we have to draw from these new historicist readings is that they are, in some basic respects, not very new. Although I said earlier that these critics regularly claim that history and literature must be viewed on the same level as equally problematic, they regularly contradict this claim in their practice (as seen in the essays examined here) by beginning with certain facts in the historical context and then applying them to the play.²⁵ In their own terminology, they “prioritize” and “privilege” history over literature, like the old historicists. We also saw that in this operation they often draw on the same facts—such as the nature of the Jacobean court, or King James's personality and ideology, or his attempt to unify England and Scotland—as their predecessors, which is not surprising since there are only a limited number of these historical facts to draw on, especially if one's concept of history is limited to the workings of “power.” Indeed this concentration upon (some call it an obsession with) the contemporary power apparatus is a well recognized trait of the new historicists, and may in part account for their tendency, pointed out by Thompson, to ignore or minimize the role of the women in Lear.²⁶ Finally, it should be noted that even though all these readings are intentionalist, they do not find any coherent design that shapes the play; indeed we saw that as the readings become more historically specific, the view of the play that emerges from them becomes more fragmented.

It is much easier to see the break with New Critical formalism, and this applies not only to the new historicists but also to the Marxists and feminists. The practitioners of these three approaches insist that they are opening up questions about the relationship of the literary text to the external world that were closed off by the formalist attempt to isolate the work-in-itself. They clearly have done this, since all the readings we examined seek to “contextualize” King Lear in terms of class or gender conflicts or other social or psychological forces outside the play. What is not so clear is how much this has enhanced our understanding and appreciation of the play, and on that point I have not tried to conceal my disappointment. Part of the problem, I think, is that while these approaches open up new questions about the play, they also tend to close off many of the old formalist questions concerning its coherence and our ethical and emotional engagement in it—the kind of questions that Goldberg disparages. This, of course, is the nature of any critical approach; it focuses on certain aspects of the work and neglects others, which is why we need a plurality of approaches. Thus, the Marxists, feminists, and new historicists could respond, with some justification, that I am disappointed because I expected them to enhance a formalist understanding of the play, which is not their purpose. Another explanation could be that these approaches have not yet realized their full potential—that they succeeded in the essential preliminary task of enlarging the area of critical discourse, which is in itself no small achievement, but that the fruits of their breakthrough are still in the future. I believe we should always remain open to this possibility and search for the merits as well as the faults in each new reading we encounter, being careful to avoid a blanket condemnation of these recent approaches as well as a nostalgic idealization of the good old days that so often accompanies it.

Notes

1. Greenblatt's essay appeared in an anthology titled After Strange Texts. Since all the essays in it deal with well-known texts, the title must mean that they are trying to make the texts seem strange to us—but obviously not strange enough to satisfy Goldberg.

2. I am not suggesting that this revolution began after 1981. The essays in Danson's collection were presented as lectures in 1978-79 by members of the Princeton faculty, who may have been regarded even then as somewhat old fashioned. It is also an all-male assemblage, which does not seem to bother them.

3. I discuss these two approaches in New Readings, chaps. 3 and 4.

4. These anthologies and surveys are listed at the end of this essay.

5. Another prominent recent approach is performance criticism, which I omit because it is discussed elsewhere in this anthology. I also omit the deconstructive approach since it has not been very important in Shakespeare studies, though it has produced a few readings of Lear—see Cope, Felperin, and Goldberg (1984).

6. One does not have to be a Marxist to recognize this; Kettle notes that it was pointed out by Danby.

7. His division of the cast is similar to Kettle's: Lear represents “the feudal-aristocratic system” but is “regenerated,” Goneril, Regan, and Edmund embody the new forces of “primary accumulation,” and Cordelia and Edgar are “progressive characters” who have “poorly delineated class characteristics” but are “profoundly humanist” and give us “hope for a better future” (69-71).

8. This is the old Marxist distinction between “ideology” and “science”; many revisionist Marxists disown it, but it keeps cropping up in their work.

9. This reflects the two faces of Marxism, which claims to be both a science for understanding society and a political program for changing it. Jameson tries—unsuccessfully, I think—to reconcile them.

10. Ryan objects to humanist critics who make “schematised abstractions” the “real protagonists of the play” (66), but he and other Marxist critics do the same thing with different abstractions such as “class division” or “ideology.”

11. This point is made by McAlindon.

12. Some other early feminist thematic critics analyze the play as a conflict between “male bonding” and “male-female relations” (Erickson) or between the “masculine principle” and the “feminine principle” (French).

13. Other feminist critics have extended this approach to discover much less convincing “hidden mothers” in many other plays of Shakespeare. (In her 1989 book Chodorow qualifies her earlier claim that she has found the one basic cause of behavior.) There are also some feminist psychological critics, such as Asp, who apply a more orthodox Freudian approach to King Lear.

14. Her targets include earlier studies by Kahn and Adelman; we saw, however, that this “mimetic model” applies to Kahn (and Novy) but not to Adelman. We also saw that there is no necessary connection between this “mimetic” mode of criticism and political liberalism, since it is practiced by many Marxists.

15. This is related to Bertolt Brecht's argument for an “alienation effect” to subvert our emotional involvement in the action so that we can perceive its underlying causes (i.e., capitalism), but this distrust of the emotional power of art goes back to Plato's Republic. Adelman presents her evaluation of Lear as a third alternative between the earlier critics' acceptance of the emotional effect and McLuskie's complete rejection of it (310).

16. She also wrote a survey of Lear criticism listed at the end.

17. Thompson objects that this is only “social history” rather than political and economic (i.e., “materialist”) history (125).

18. Chodorow and Marx, however, differ from Freud in insisting that their universal laws can be repealed, either by a feminist revolution that ends the gender division of labor in the family (so that “mothering” is no longer relegated to women) or by a socialist revolution that ends all class divisions in society. (See also note 13 on Chodorow's later amendment to her law.)

19. There are nonreligious exorcisms in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, which Greenblatt cites (111), but they are too farcical for his purpose. Shakespeare avoids staging any religious ritual—see, for example, his treatment of the wedding of Romeo and Juliet, the coronation of Henry V, the funeral of Ophelia, and the baptism of Elizabeth.

20. Kahn (44) and McLuskie (103) also refer to the conflict, as I noted. Kahn cites the title of Greenblatt's essay as “Lear's Anxiety” (328), which is incorrect but actually closer to his subject than the correct title.

21. The main difference, I think, is not that he is historical and she is not, but that she slights the problem of representation while he slights gender—he notes the absence of Wayland's wife and Lear's, but it does not seem to matter to him that Wayland is dealing with a son and Lear with daughters.

22. He admits that this view of Lear's error is never stated by anyone in the play (135). Some old historicist “ideas-of-the-time” critics also advanced this view, which I dispute in New Readings 149-51.

23. I criticize this approach in New Readings, chap. 4. (Patterson also refers to the court performance [115] but it is unimportant in her reading, which is not occasionalist.) Marcus's reading is even more specific since it is limited to the quarto version, which, she claims, contains material written for this occasion that disappears in the folio version (149-52). This is the only interpretation examined here that relies upon the two-text theory, though it is also mentioned by Heinemann, Adelman, and Patterson.

24. She even suggests that Gloucester's blinding is a punishment for “passively allow[ing] the holiday violation” of denying hospitality to Lear (155), but the fact is that he is blinded for trying to help Lear. Compare Tennenhouse's claim that it is a punishment for legitimizing Edmund.

25. Pechter gives examples of this discrepancy between new historicist theory and practice. There is a more striking one in Goldberg's essay (1987) from which my epigraph is taken; he criticizes Greenblatt for opening his discussion of Lear (1985) “with a characteristic gesture toward the unquestioned reality of dates and facts, the local event that locates the Shakespearean text within a cultural economy” (244), but then opens his discussion of a Latin entertainment with the same gesture: “On August 27, 1605, in the course of a visit James and his family made to Oxford, they were welcomed to St. John's College by a learned show” (257).

26. Tennenhouse explicitly states that he will “dissolve the sexual theme” into themes of “state power” (123, 142); see also note 21 on Greenblatt.

Bibliography

Adelman, Janet. “Suffocating Mothers in King Lear.” Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest,” New York: Routledge, 1992, 103-29.

Asp, Carolyn. “‘The Clamor of Eros’: Freud, Aging, and King Lear.” Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis. Edited by Kathleen Woodward and Murray Schwartz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 192-204.

Battenhouse, Roy. “Moral Experience and Its Typology in King Lear.” Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969, 269-302.

Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

———. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Cope, Jackson. “Shakespeare, Derrida, and the End of Language in Lear.” Shakespeare and Deconstruction. Edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David Bergeron. New York: Peter Lang, 1988, 267-83.

Danby, John. Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of “King Lear.” London: Faber & Faber, 1949.

Delany, Paul. “King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism.” PMLA 92 (1977): 429-40.

Dollimore, Jonathan. “King Lear and Essentialist Humanism.” Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester, 1984, 189-203; 2nd ed. 1989.

Erickson, Peter. “Maternal Images and Male Bonds in … King Lear.” Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 103-15.

Felperin, Howard. “Plays Within Plays: … King Lear …” Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, 87-106.

French, Marilyn. “King Lear.” Shakespeare's Division of Experience. 1981. New York: Ballantine, 1983, 219-42.

Goddard, Harold. “King Lear.” The Meaning of Shakespeare. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 2.136-71.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation: King Lear 4:6 in Perspective.” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 537-47. Reprinted in Shakespeare and Deconstruction. Edited by G. Douglas Atkins and David Bergeron. New York: Peter Lang, 1988, 245-65.

———. Review of Dollimore, Radical Tragedy. Modern Philology 84 (1986): 71-75.

———. “Speculations: Macbeth and Source.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Edited by Jean Howard and Marion O'Connor. New York: Methuen, 1987, 242-64.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs.” Raritan 2 (1982): 92-114. Reprinted in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990, 80-98.

———. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

———. “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature. Edited by Gregory Jay and David Miller. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985, 101-23. Other versions appear in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985, 163-87; and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 94-128; earlier version in Genre 15 (1982): 239-42.

Heinemann, Margot. “Demystifying the Mystery of State: King Lear and the World Upside Down.” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 75-83.

Jameson, Fredric. “Science versus Ideology.” Humanities in Society 6 (1983): 283-302.

Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Norton, 1949.

Kavanagh, James. “Shakespeare in Ideology.” Alternative Shakespeares. Edited by John Drakakis. London: Methuen, 1985, 144-65.

Kahn, Coppélia. “The Absent Mother in King Lear.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 33-49; earlier version: “Excavating ‘Those Dim Minoan Regions’: Maternal Subtexts in Patriarchal Literature.” Diacritics 12 (1982): 32-41.

Kettle, Arnold. “From Hamlet to Lear.” Shakespeare in a Changing World. Edited by Arnold Kettle. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964, 146-71.

Kott, Jan. “King Lear or Endgame.” Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964, 87-124.

Levin, Richard. New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

McAlindon, Tom. “Tragedy, King Lear, and the Politics of the Heart.” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 85-90.

McLuskie, Kathleen. “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 88-108.

Marcus, Leah. “Retrospective: King Lear on St. Stephen's Night, 1606.” Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 148-59.

Novy, Marianne. “Patriarchy, Mutuality, and Forgiveness in King Lear.” Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984, 150-63; earlier version in Southern Humanities Review 13 (1979): 281-92.

Patterson, Annabel. “‘What Matter Who's Speaking’: … King Lear.” Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989, 106-19.

Pechter, Edward. “The New Historicism and its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama.” PMLA 102 (1987): 292-303.

Ryan, Kiernan. “King Lear: ‘men / Are as the time is’.” Shakespeare. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 66-73.

Smirnov, Aleksandr. Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation. Translated by Sonia Volochova. New York: Critics' Group, 1936, 68-71; reprinted 1970, 1977.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. “The Theater of Punishment: Jacobean Tragedy and the Politics of Misogyny.” Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres. New York: Methuen, 1986, 102-46.

Thompson, Ann. “Are There Any Women in King Lear?” The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Edited by Valerie Wayne. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 117-28.

Wickham, Glynne. “From Tragedy to Tragi-Comedy: King Lear as Prologue.” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 33-48.

Anthologies of Criticism

Adelman, Janet, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “King Lear.” Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978.

Bloom, Harold, ed. King Lear. Major Literary Characters. New York: Chelsea House, 1992.

———. William Shakespeare's “King Lear.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Bonheim, Helmut, ed. The “King Lear” Perplex. San Francisco: Wadsworth, 1960.

Colie, Rosalie, and F. T. Flahiff, eds. Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

Danson, Lawrence, ed. On “King Lear.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Harrison, G. B., and Robert McDonnell, eds. “King Lear”: Text, Sources, Criticism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

Kermode, Frank, ed. Shakespeare: “King Lear”: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1969; revised edition 1992.

Muir, Kenneth, ed. “King Lear”: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1984.

Muir, Kenneth, and Stanley Wells, eds. Aspects of “King Lear”: Articles Reprinted from “Shakespeare Survey.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Ryan, Kiernan, ed. “King Lear,” New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960) and 33 (1980).

Surveys of Criticism

Champion, Larry, ed. “King Lear”: An Annotated Bibliography. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1980.

Everett, Barbara. “The New King Lear.” Critical Quarterly 2 (1960): 325-39.

Harbage, Alfred. “The Fierce Dispute.” Conceptions of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966, 77-98.

Hibbard, George. “King Lear: A Retrospect, 1939-79.” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 1-12; reprinted in Muir-Wells anthology.

Ray, Robert, ed. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's “King Lear.” New York: Modern Language Association, 1986.

Thompson, Ann. “King Lear.” The Critics Debate. London: Macmillan, 1988.