Similarity of Lear to a Morality Play
The Twentieth Century Interest in Lear
Tragedy was invented in Athens in the fifth century B.C.E. (Before the Common Era, aka, B.C.)
Click here for a link that provides discussion of the origins of Drama.
Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, wrote the definitive work on Tragedy. He wrote that at the climax of the play's action, the death of a noble but flawed hero, the audience undergoes an emotional response of pity and terror, pity for the fall of a great man and terror for the fall that could happen to anyone. Lear is such a noble but flawed hero whom we pity, but we also feel terror for ourselves that in this world undeserved suffering is possible.
Many scholars believe that King Lear is Shakespeare's greatest work. "In its social range it encompasses a whole society, from king to beggar, and invites us to move in our imagination between a royal palace and a hovel on a bare heath" (Foakes).
Many see the play in terms of universal values and believe that the play represents a "spiritual journey through life of suffering Man" (Foakes) that everyone can relate to. Certainly it it has seemed the play of our time. "It has seemed to some the play of our time in being open to nihilistic interpretation as showing not the potentially heroic journey or pilgrimage of Man through life, but rather a progression towards despair or mere nothingness" (Foakes).
The critic Maynard Mack points out that Lear is like a medieval Morality play stood on its head. In a Morality play which always dramatized a Christian message, the audience saw Man as a pilgrim going from "pride and innocence, temptation and fall, regeneration and salvation or ruin and damnation This is also, essentially, what Lear is, save that in the case of Lear we must add to the arc of pilgrimage Shakespeare's more tragic vision of the creature whose fate it is to learn to love only to lose . . . the loved one, and to reach a ripeness through suffering and struggle, only to die." In short, unlike a Morality play, Lear provides no possibility of redemption; suffering has no purpose; suffering is just suffering.
Lear also reminds us of the suffering of Job in the Bible, but at least there is a god who has a purpose in causing the suffering. In Job, there is at least something in the universe -- a rather cruel God -- other than ourselves.
The fool's "philosophy is based on the assumption that every one is a fool; and the greatest fool is he who does not know he is a fool" (Kott 164). But for all that, the fool does not desert his master and accompanies his ridiculous king on his way to madness. "The Fool knows that the only true madness is to regard this world as rational. The feudal order is absurd and can be described only in terms of the absurd. The world stands upside down:" (Kott 167)
The Japanese film maker, Kirasawa, made Ran, the Lear story played out during Japanese medieval period and using sons instead of daughters. The battles at the end evoke the twentieth century nuclear destruction in Japan.
Jane Smiley wrote, A Thousand Acres (also a movie by the same name), a feminist interpretation of Lear. The book provides an answer to the unloving attitudes of the motherless Goneril and Reagan.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare: Our Contemporary. trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
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