Browsing by Subject "King Lear"
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Item Avoiding Edmund : reading acknowledgment as failure in Stanley Cavell’s King Lear(2017-05) Khoshnood, Alfredo Manuchehr; Mallin, Eric ScottCritics of King Lear often remark that the play feels like a dramatic failure despite its place at the very top of the Shakespearean canon. Using Stanley Cavell’s famous essay on the play, “The Avoidance of Love,” as a framework for interpreting Lear, I argue that an epistemological and ethical failure lies at the heart of the play: an inability to acknowledge the presence of others. In my reading, Cavell’s essay works emotively rather than argumentatively, by approximating the affective scenario of King Lear. Appropriately, Cavell’s essay falters in the same way that Shakespeare’s play does: it cannot attempt to acknowledge other minds without enacting the failure of that very effort. I consider this failure primarily in relation to Edmund, the play’s chief antagonist. Using Cavell’s understanding of what it means to be present before others and before oneself, I show that Edmund’s final words are a brief and poignant instance in which he realizes his true position relative to other minds and his own. I argue that Cavell’s argument fails to properly consider Edmund by its own terms, and in doing so, it enacts its own subject: the impossibility of acknowledging the presence of the other. Moving to Lear’s Fool, I argue that the Fool functions as a voice of political consciousness, comparing his position to Cavell’s own context. The Fool imagines a world where the failure of acknowledgment leaves everyone “darkling.” Ultimately, the play imagines human relationships in essentially pessimistic terms: the attempt to recognize the other results in the erasure of any sense of commonalityItem Studies in English(University of Texas at Austin, 1934-07-08) University of Texas at AustinItem Torture and the drama of emergency : Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare(2010-05) Turner, Timothy Adrian, 1981-; Henkel, Jacqueline Margaret; Whigham, Frank; Levack, Brian; Rebhorn, Wayne; Rumrich, JohnTorture and the Drama of Emergency: Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare recovers the legal complexity of early modern torture and makes it central to an account of the anti-torture politics of the English stage. More people were tortured in the 1580s and 1590s than at any other time in England's history, and this sudden increase generated a backlash in the form of calls for the protection of liberties. Chapters on plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare show how theater contributed to this backlash by means of its unique ability to present on the public stage the otherwise private suffering characteristic of state torture. Above all, these playwrights alerted audiences to the dangers posed by the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the monarch. The introduction and first chapter of Torture and the Drama of Emergency demonstrate that although torture was unknown to common law, it was executed in the context of a state of emergency. The second chapter presents Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as resistance literature: rather than critiquing Spanish cruelty, as its setting implies, the play indicts English torture. Kyd uses the genre of revenge tragedy, enormously popular after and because of his play, to argue that torture is a form of revenge the state itself might carry out. Chapter three, on 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, argues that Tamburlaine transforms the world into a military camp by extending martial law to everyone, everywhere. Marlowe's portrayal of the creation and rise of this totalitarian regime depicts the nightmarish consequences for the people when the state's power to extend martial law remains unchecked. The final chapter, on King Lear, argues that in his most pessimistic play Shakespeare suggests there is no escape from the state's ability to seize absolute power in times of crisis. Lear's moving but tenuous declaration of human rights remains a dream that cannot survive the state of emergency created when he divides the kingdom.