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Critical Approaches to Shakespeare’s Plays

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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.

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