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Lear Main Points · Making sense as opposed to meaning. (In this reading is as creative as acting or directing. We can listen to baroque music on baroque instruments, but we can’t listen with baroque ears. Each age, each culture, & ultimately each individual will make sense of the text in their own way. This is a creative & an intellectual activity: our reading can be more or less creative; informed to a greater or lesser degree. A text as complex as Lear will yield an enormous, & constantly surprising range of meanings in its engagement with a creative intelligence. However, it will not yield meanings arbitrarily: Lear has an enormous integrity; an integrity which is not always well discerned or described by conventional criticism. [Overhead. Saying “nothing”. Constant discovery through performance.] · Multiple interpretations. (Three aspects to this: (a) Shakespeare’s texts are inherently likely to generate multiple meanings because of the habit he inherited of seeing everything from multiple perspectives, most obviously the ‘straight’ view & the 'parodic’ view – equivalent, in a way, to tragic vision comic vision, sometimes sequentially, sometimes simultaneously. (b) the sense we make of it as an individual – the creative & imaginative input we make; (c) ‘motivated’ readings that have been made by critical movements. So, for example, we have had: New Criticism {1920’ – 1950’s} which sees the play as an autonomous & organic art work which is to be interpreted in its own terms, with no reference to historical or other contexts. Great literature, in this view, is the repository of ‘Human’ & ‘Life Affirming’ values. It is apolitical. From this school come the studies of, eg, Shakespeare’s imagery, & the tendency to see it not so much as a work for the stage, but as an extended poem. G. Wilson Knight, Cleanth Brooks, Wolfgang Clemens etc.. The hidden agenda here is middle-class liberal humanism which is not even aware that it regards its own values as universal & timeless. Redemptive or Christian criticism sees Cordelia as a symbolic, quasi-religious figure, who, re-united with Lear signifies his spiritual redemption in a material wasteland. A.C. Bradley, L. C. Knights. Existentialist/Absurdist criticism after Beckett – Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Marxist criticism sees the play in purely secular terms as an attack on the injustices of a class-ridden society. Jonathn Dollimore, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey. See Kosintsev’s film. Feminist criticism sees Shakespeare either as a shameless upholder of the inequalities of a patriarchal society, or, on the other hand as a dramatist who, to a surprising extent, resisted the hegemony of patriarchy. Marilyn French, Catherine Belsey, Kathleen McLuskie. Neo-historicism, which reinstates the historical context of the production of the plays, but which puts an emphasis on cultural & social history. Stephen Greenblatt. Psychoanalytic criticism, which uses the insights & terminology of psychoanalysis to investigate, not so much individual characters as the plays themselves. The Criticism of Sexual Difference/Sexual dissidence: This draws to itself feminists, & queer theorists who investigate desire, sexuality, homosexuality & transvestism on the Early Modern stage, using terms drawn from the field of psychoanalysis. Alan Sinfeld, Valerie Traub, Susan Zimerman. Performance Criticism since the early seventies. I'd recommend Marvin Rosenberg's The Masks of King Lear. The thing to remember here is that Shakespeare, as the history of feature film over the past 15 years shows, is such a powerfully iconic cultural figure that his plays have become bloody fields upon which ideological struggles & battles for meaning are fought out.) · Meaning, making sense & ‘themes’. Explanatory writers, & exploratory writers: dramatists like Shaw or Ibsen (in his middle plays) proceed from ideas, & quite deliberately construct plays around a number of themes [A Doll’s House; Mrs. Warren’s Profession]. Writers like Shakespeare & Chekhov proceed from images, it seems to me, which are much less predictable, & which have the capacity to explode with meaning. Ibsen or Shaw, for example, promote the progressive intellectual & political preoccupations of their time, whereas Shakespeare reflects the obsessions, anxieties, neuroses & nightmares of his age in a succession of complex images made up not only of words, but bodies & objects on the stage, sound-effects, & the actions & gestures of the actors – we’ll come back to this. (so, ironically, did Brecht, despite his protestations to the contrary). If you apply the word ‘theme’ to the analysis & description of a Shakespearean text, try to think of it not so much as a discrete & neatly-packaged concept, & more like a suggestive, interlinked & affective process, like the themes in music. Shakespeare, it seems to me, uses motifs in a similarly musical way. If I find standard critical terminology limiting & misleading, it is out of the experience of working practically with the texts as an actor & a director. · Which leads me to a fundamental, & far too neglected aspect of Shakespeare, which is his theatricality.
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