“When I teach King Lear, I have to begin by reminding my students that Lear, however unlovable in the first two acts, is very much loved by Cordelia, the Fool, Albany, Kent, Gloucester, and Edgar.”
(page 479)
“The play’s great villain, the superb and uncanny Edmund, is ice-cold, indifferent to Lear as he is even to his own father Gloucester, his half brother Edgar, and his lovers Goneril and Regan. It is part of Shakespeare’s genius not to have Edmund and Lear address even a single word to each other in the entire play, because they are apocalyptic antitheses: the king is all feeling, and Edmund is bare of all effect.”
(page 479)
“One function of Lear’s Fool is precisely that of Hamlet’s Horatio: to mediate, for the audience, a personage otherwise beyond our knowing. … The Fool bewilderingly vanishes, another Shakespeare ellipsis that challenges the audience to reflect upon the meanings of this strangest of characters.” (page
494)
to Shakespeare
“It is however a mark of Shakespeare’s uncompromising view of reality that there is no simple application of poetic justice to reward the good and punish the wicked. The good die too. … That Lear should die is perhaps no surprise. The suffering that he has endured in his confrontation with the primal elements does not allow an optimistic return to normal life and prosperity. He has looked into the eye of nature and there is nothing left for him but to die.” (page 182)
“You have, King James told his eldest son a few years before Shakespeare wrote King Lear, a double obligation to love God: first because He made you a man, and second because He made you ‘a little God to sit on his throne, and rule over other men.’ … The idea of sovereignty was closely linked to fantasies of divine omnipotence.” (page 2307)
“There are, indeed, as John Holloway suggests, remarkable parallels between King Lear and Job. In Job, Satan, with divine permission, tempts Job to curse God. Job becomes the very type of affliction, and Lear is conscious of this when he undertakes to be ‘the pattern of all patience.’ The terrors of God set themselves in array against him.” (page 1253)
“For another book of the Bible was in Shakespeare’s mind: Revelation, and especially its account of the last days before final judgment.” (page 1253)
“Through all this apocalyptic turmoil runs the word nothing, first spoken in the opening dialogue between Lear and Cordelia. … God made the world out of nothing (Lear agrees with Aristotle that nothing can come of nothing, but Christian philosophy knew that God created the world ex nihilo) and to nothing it
seems to be returning.” (page 1253)
167