Abstract
When King Lear was published in Nicolas Rowe’s 1710 edition of The Works of William Shakespeare, it was with the warning that its disregard for poetic justice had ruined its tragic effect.1 For the next hundred years, audiences agreed,2 but in the nineteenth century, the play’s critical fortunes slowly reversed. Schlegel defended Cordelia’s death as a moral necessity, Keats celebrated its “close relationship with Beauty & Truth,” Coleridge insisted that it was grounded on the “moral verities,” Edmund Dowden saw it as the “supreme fact” of moral life, and Lamb and Hazlitt called it “sublime.”3 Yet at the same time as Lear was gaining a reputation as Shakespeare’s most ethical tragedy, it was also becoming notorious as his least playable one. Though revived by William Macready in 1834, it was never as popular as Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth. Lamb declared it unactable, and Hazlitt thoroughly agreed. Lear may no longer have been seen as an immoral play, but neither was it seen as good theater.
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Notes
Charles Gildon, “The Art and Progress of the Stage in France, Rome and England,” in The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 7 vols. (London, 1709–10), 7.406.
Philip Hobsbaum, “King Lear in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Language Review 68 (1973): 494–506.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 95
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Harper, 1918), 202
Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
William Desmond, “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143–71.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 267–53.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 46. 8.
James Conant, “On Bruns, On Cavell” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 616–34 for discussion.
Gerald Bruns, “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 612–32.
Barry Stroud, “Reasonable Claims: Cavell and the Tradition” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 731–44, 736.
Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” in The Revival of Pragmatism, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 72–80, 78.
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 114–15.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).
Stanley Cavell, “The Politics of Interpretation” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).
Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 207–22.
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Trade, 1999), 4.
Berel Lang, “Nothing Comes of All: Lear-Dying,” New Literary History 9 (1978): 537–59, 541
Anthony Palmer, “Skepticism and Tragedy: Crossing Shakespeare with Descartes” in Wittgenstein and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus (London: Routledge, 2004), 260–77.
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© 2011 Angus Fletcher
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Fletcher, A. (2011). King Lear and the Endurance of Tragedy. In: Evolving Hamlet. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118386_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118386_7
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