Critical Approaches to Shakespeare’s Plays

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Definitions and illustrations from King Lear condensed from Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

Critical Approaches

Formalism
Structuralism
Psychoanalysis
Marxism
Post-Structuralism
Feminism
Gender Studies
Historicism
Ethnic, Post-Colonial, and International Studies

[Gopa B. Caesar]

a. Formalism

Paradox and irony

Opposing values or terms are crossed; what is prized is suddenly despised.

Cordelia, the favorite, is outcast.

Truth is prized, but flattery demanded.

The king becomes a poor beggar; the beggar Edgar will be king.

The blinded man suddenly sees the truth.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

b. Structuralism

Considers characters  not as “real” people, but as functions of a textual system.

Goneril and Regan’s duplicitousness contrasts Cordelia’s plot function of fidelity or restoration.

Characters are signifiers linked to concepts, which have a binary character (X or not X).

Edmund signifies the betrayal of trust.

Edgar signifies the keeping of trust.

Moral qualities are replaced by binary oppositional terms as in linguistics.
[This approach prevents us from “identifying” with characters; instead, we study them in a context.]

Edgar and Lear are not “innocent,” but “not possessing knowledge.”

Goneril, Regan,and Edmund are not “traitors,” but those who “possess knowledge.”
(For Ryan, the play is about the need to maintain a royal, noble king.)
The double plot is therefore not about a comparison of Lear and Gloucester (blind fathers), but about the testing of Edgar and the overcoming of his faults that allows him to succeed Lear as king.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Structuralism contd.

Royal power controls succession and keeps it within the family. But it must also ensure that the successor is noble.

With Cordelia banished and Regan and Goneril not noble, the Gloucester plot is necessary to provide a successor from outside the family.

Nobility trumps natural succession in the value system of the play.

Edmund prays to Nature, because he believes family ties are more important than social distinctions (the “plague of custom” that distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate).

But he misses the point that his definition of nature, by failing to distinguish noble from not noble (including his own nature), cannot assure the most noble successor.

Nature defines family relations.  It also indiscriminately produces what is good and what is bad, the noble and the not noble.

The movement of the play is from indifference to differentiation, which leads to loss of power. Recognition of difference restores power.

From the point of view of power, then, difference and the morality of good and evil, seem natural.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Psychoanalysis basically deals with

-The study of sexual fears and desires, often unconscious.

-Interpersonal relations and the creation of the self.

In the concerned text the question those should be discussed are:

What causes Lear’s madness?
Does Lear have  unconscious sexual desires for his daughters?
Where are the mothers in the play?
The meaning of “nothing” (slang; also pronounced as “noting.”)
The violence done to sexually powerful women in the play.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

d. Marxism

How does the work reflect the economic and social conditions of its time?

How does it reflect the ideology of the times; that is, the ideas that support those who control the economy and society?

Feudal ideology = belief that ruling order was higher than commoners, whose reward would come in the afterlife.

Capitalist ideology= individuals can freely strive for success in an open society.

King Lear promotes aristocratic values as necessary for rule; denounces merchants and lawyers.

Yet, the play reflects the contradiction inherent in feudalism: the agricultural surplus made trade possible, allowing merchants to live in towns and emerge from under the  control of feudal landlords.

The feudal forms of social relations based on mutual loyalty and trust give way to early capitalist relations of ambition, disrespect for traditional notions of duty, and distrust.

Goneril and  Regan represent the new sensibility; Edmund represents the new individual merchant.
Edgar and Kent represents the old forms of knighthood.
The ideological work of the play consists of evoking disaster caused by capitalist values and then restoring aristocratic values.
Albany calls down lightning on evil Goneril, conflating society with the cosmos.

Edgar’s noble ascension is magical (indicating contradition in old feudal system).

[Gopa B. Caesar]

e. Post-Structuralism

In contrast to structuralism, that looks for invariant rules of literature and society, post-structuralism realizes language generates multiple meanings.

Reason is not an instrument of understanding, but of discipline and social control.

Identities are contingent, meanings are undecidable.

Friedrick Nietzsche regarded everything from aesthetic beauty to  legal justice as projections of power.

King Lear, particularly in the mad scenes, exposes the pretences of normal behavior (we humans are really animals) and reveals the repressed underside of social life.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

f. Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida claims that western philosophy, which claims to speak for reason, truth, and knowledge, does so by violent acts of opposition and hierarchization.

Good terms: speech, men, originality, truth (the idea as present in the mind), white, us

Bad terms: writing, women, repetition, representation (the idea presented in language), black, them

The crisis of madness in King Lear is a crisis of metaphysics, of the values that privilege identity over difference and truth over representation.

The moral ideals of virtue, fidelity, honesty, gratitude are inseparble from truth as an internal essence or ideal identity. For example, Cordelia identifies herself as an emblem of truth: “so young . . . so true.”

Because moral virtue transcends langauge, moral illegitimacy will be inseparable from representation. To  behave badly in the play will be to speak falsely.

The restoration of moral and philosophic order will thus be described by Edgar as a triumph of true speech over false: “Speak what we mean, not what we ought to say.”

Cordelia represents truth that stands outside of signification. She delays or defers her relation to meaning.

Writing is a betrayal of truth, just as letters betray Oswald and Goneril.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

g. Feminism

How does the play address the (subordinate, marginalized) life experience of women?

Are women conceived as different? How?

How do women construct male identities?

Lear is an abusive patriarch, not a character whose virtues are vices.

Cordelia’s death is necessary to Lear’s tragic redemption.

The language of the play subtly defames women.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

h. Gender Studies, Queer Theory

Does the work invite or condemn alternative sexual practices?
How is sexual identity constructed?
How does (male) heterosexuality maintain its dominance?
How does repressed homosexuality manifest itself?
Lear posits various punishments for unbridled sexuality.
Illegitimate Edmund is a bad person.
Goneril is dissatisfied in Albany’s bed; Regan is a lusty widow; both pay with their lives for their attraction to Edmund.
Lear sheds his clothes and joins Edgar in nakedness, the visual display of homosexuality, at the time associated with demonic possession and witches.
Edgar undergoes the experience of liquefaction that is effeminization; like the other men at the end of the play, he weeps. Men become like women--but the play radically suggests gender traits are contingent, not natural.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

i. Historicism

Literature is a mode of discourse, a form of representation intimately connected to the expression of and struggle for power.

Typically, a New Historical essay begins with an historical anecdote and then establishes connections with certain features of a literary work, as when Stephen Greenblatt compares recording Indian words in the New World to the containment of what might seem to be subversive comments in 1 Henry IV.

King Lear is a play about rebellion against a kign that hinges on a denial of hospitality.

King James did not like the duties of office. He favored plain speech. He believed in the divine right of kings.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

j. Ethnic, Post-Colonial, and International Studies

Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese director, retold the story of King Lear in Ran.

But Japanese culture could not conceive of man paying any attention to daughters; the hero of the story has two sons, not three daughters.

Harold Bloom finds the result a strong reading, pure Kurosawa and excellent Shakepeare.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Critical Approaches: the counter-arguments

Bloom calls the approaches products of the School of Resentment.
Great literature is about re-reading, not life.
Key research tool is a good dictionary.
Continued need for close reading that seeks to connect the themes and elements of a work. That connection is the meaning or purpose or end or “final cause” of the work.
The canon is not constructed by today’s local concerns: if the purpose of literature is to open up other worlds, what could be more constricting or instulting than to offer each ethnic group only its own small corpus?

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Conclusion

If you don’t like a classic, consider that you may be the one with limited vision, not Shakespeare.

Any approach--or combination of approaches--that seems right to you will be right to others if you express your ideas clearly and honestly (meaning, you have read the work carefully and imaginatively and thought about it deeply).

[Tamanna Islam]