'King Lear' in Context

Keith Linley

Description

Bringing to life the historical, cultural, social and moral background of Shakespeare’s most disturbing tragedy

How did the court audience of 1606 respond to Shakespeare’s most disturbing tragedy? This engaging book provides in-depth discussion of the various influences a contemporary audience would have brought to interpreting ‘King Lear’. How did people think about the world, about God, about sin, about kings, about civilized conduct? Historical, literary, political and sociological backgrounds are explained within the biblical-moral matrices by which the play would have been judged. This book links real life in the 1600s to Lear’s world on the stage. Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, parenting and family dynamics, court corruption, class tensions, the literary profile of the time, the concept of tragedy – and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play an unsettling picture of a disintegrating world in free fall.

Introduction; Prologue; 1. The Historical Context; 2. The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity to Dust; 3. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness; 4. The Seven Cardinal Virtues; 5. Kingship; 6. Patriarchy, Family and Gender Relationships; 7. Man in His Place; 8. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context; 9. The Contemporary Political Context; 10. The Literary Context; 11. The Context of Tragedy; 12. The Family Context; 13. Sins, Transgressions, Subversions and Reversals; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783083749
• Langue: English

Extrait

King Lear in Context
ANTHEM PERSPECTIVES IN LITERATURE
Titles in the Anthem Perspectives in Literature series are designed to contextualize classic works of literature for readers today within their original social and cultural environments. The books present historical, biographical, political, artistic, moral, religious and philosophical material from the period that enable readers to understand a text’s meaning as it would have struck the original audience. These approachable but informative books aims to uncover the period and the people for whom texts were written; their values and views, their anxieties and demons, what made them laugh and cry, their loves and hates. The series is targeted at high-achieving A-level, International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement pupils, first-year undergraduates and an intellectually curious audience.

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2015 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Keith Linley 2015
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linley, Keith. King Lear in context : the cultural background / Keith Linley. pages cm. – (Anthem perspectives in literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78308-373-2 (papercover : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. King Lear. 2. Literature and society–England–History–16th century. 3. Literature and society–England–History–17th century. 4. Kings and rulers in literature. 5. Lear, King of England (Legendary character)– In literature. I. Title. PR2819.L55 2015 822.3’3–dc23 2014049086
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 373 2 (Pbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 373 5 (Pbk)
Cover image © Andrew_Howe/iStockphoto.com
This title is also available as an ebook.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue: Grim Expectations
Part I. The Inherited Past and the Jacobean Present
1. The Historical Context: An Overview
2. The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity to Dust
3. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness
4. The Seven Cardinal Virtues
5. Kingship
6. Patriarchy, Family Authority and Gender Relationships
7. Man in His Place
8. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context
9. The Contemporary Political Context
10. The Literary Context
11. The Context of Tragedy
12. The Family Context
Part II. The World Turned Upside Down
13. Sins, Transgressions, Subversions and Reversals
Notes
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
About This Book
This book concentrates on the contexts from which King Lear emerges, those characteristics of life in early Jacobean England which are reflected in the values and views Shakespeare brings to the text and affect how a contemporary might have responded to it. These are the primary, central contexts, comprising the writer, the text, the audience and all the views, values and beliefs held by these three. The actions taken and words spoken by the characters do not all represent Shakespeare’s own views, but they will have evoked ethical judgements from the audience in line with the general religious and political values of the time. There would have been a range of differing responses, though the fundamentals of right and wrong would have been broadly agreed. These primary contexts, this complicity of writer, audience and text and their shared mediation of the play, are the prime concern of this book.
Where relevant, the book also focuses on a range of secondary contexts. A play does not come into being without having a background and does not exist in vacuo . It will have its own unique features, but it will have characteristics inherited from its author, as well as sources derived from and traits resembling the writing of its time. Other secondary contexts – the actors, their companies, the acting space, the social mix of general audiences – do not figure in this study except as occasional incidentals. However, the first recorded performance of King Lear was at court, and the book discusses that unique audience.
There are tertiary contexts too. There is the afterlife of a text (its printed form, how subsequent ages interpreted it on stage and changed it) – what is called its performance history. And there is the critical backstory, showing how critics of subsequent times bring their own agendas and the values and prejudices of their period to analysis of a text. These are referenced incidentally where they seem useful and relevant, but are not a major concern. The ‘Further Reading’ list provides broad guidance on the critical and performance history, and any scholarly edition of King Lear will cover these areas in greater detail.
This book is for students preparing assignments and exams for Shakespeare modules. The marking criteria at any level explicitly or implicitly require students to show a consistently well-developed and consistently detailed understanding of the significance and influence of contexts in which literary texts are written and understood. This means responding to the play in the ways Shakespeare’s audience would have done. You will not be writing a history essay, but along with considering the play as a literary vehicle communicating in dramatic form, you will need to know something of how Shakespeare’s audience might have reacted. A text is always situated in some way within its historical setting. The automatic correlatives in this case would have been the classics (for the educated), the Bible, Christian ethics and the society of the day; the latter means they would view the play in the light of what had happened in recent history and what was currently happening in the court, in the city, in the streets, on the roads and in the villages. No one could watch King Lear and not think of King James, nor hear the comments on flattery by Kent and the Fool and not think of the court. References to social problems, the corruption of public life, the actuality of family breakdown before their eyes, would all evoke a disturbing sense of recognition. 1
The following material will enable you to acquire a surer grasp of this cultural context – the socio-political conditions out of which the play emerged, the literary profile prevailing when it was written, and the religious-moral dimensions embedded in it. The setting is pagan, but since Lear was written in an age of faith, when the Bible’s teachings and sermons heard in church formed part of everyone’s mindset, it is vital to recreate those factors, for the actions of the characters would have been assessed by Christian criteria. You may not agree with the values of the time or the views propounded in the play, but you do need to understand how belief mediated the possible responses of the court that watched the tragedy on 26 December 1606. A concept key to this book’s approach is that Lear is full of sins, transgressions, boundary crossing and rule breaking – in the personal world and in the public and political arenas. Alerted to the subversive behaviour of the characters, the audience would expect that the unrepentant would be punished and damned and those repenting be brought to new understanding, forgiving and being forgiven. What partly makes it a tragedy, not just a story of the good being saved and the bad punished, is that some of the good and repentant will also be sacrificial victims. Though biblical values would be applied to the action, there is much more going on scene by scene than a series of echoes of or allusions to what the Bible says about virtue and vice. Interwoven are political concerns about rule (of the self, of a state), public service and the dangers of appetite unrestrained. This study of these contexts will complete your preparation.
What Is the Primary Context?
Any document – literary or non-literary – comes from an environment and has that environment embedded in it, overtly and covertly. Its context is the conditions which produced it, the biographical, social, political, historical and cultural circumstances which form it, and the values operating within it and affecting the experience of it, including what the author may have been trying to say and how the audience may have interpreted it. A text in isolation is simply a collection of words carrying growing, developing meanings as the writing/performance progresses. It is two-dimensional – a lexical, grammatical construct and the sum of its literal contents. It has meaning, we can understand what it is about, how the characters interact, but context provides a third dimension, making meaning comprehensible within the cultural values of the time. Primary context is the sum of all the influences the writer brings to the text and all the influences the viewer/reader deploys in experiencing it. Knowing the cultural context enriches that experience. This book concentrates on the archaeology of the play, recovering how it would be understood in 1606, unearthing the prevailing attitudes of the time, and displaying the factors that shaped its meaning for that audience in 1606. These are the significations of society embedded in the tex