• Bloom on King Lear
• 1.
• Like Hamlet, a secular scripture/mythology
• Reading KL–uncanny
• Universal sorrows of generational strife
• Solomon and Lear via James
• Wisdom of Solomon
• King is as mortal as any man–echoes 6.6 174-81
• Paradigm for greatness–like Solomon–patriarchal sublimity
• Father, king, mortal god
• Relation to modern criticism–Greenblatt and Montrose
• Lear is loved by all good characters
• Man of passion vs Edmund who has no passion
• He wants more love
• Four great roles 479
• Edgar
• His recalcitrance, sullenness, refusal to assume his own identity–similar reticence to Cordelia’s
• His retelling reunion with Gloucester rather than its being dramatized gives it greater prominence [?]
• Theme of excess of love 482 [break]
• Except Edmund Everyone either loves or hates too much
• Edgar ends up overwhelmed by helplessness of love–bewilderment of identity
• Prime consequence of love love is devastation 483
• Ripeness is all is not much
• Final wisdom is to submit to weight of this sad time.
• Controlling love of Lear/ serving love Edgar
• Edmund is immune from love, and therefore doesn’t serve his deity Nature
• The play makes both sex and familial love tragic
• He childed as I fathered–true love of him and Cordelia as tragic
• Lear and Gl. Slain by their paternal love which leads only to death [cf. RJ] --Gnostic/Romantic view
• Irreparable love, destructive of every value distinct from it [dark secret love?] 487
• Shakespeare is out in front of our interpretations
• Social domination [Marxist] vs. universal doom-eager domination [of love?]
• Shakespeare and nihilism–cosmological denigingration 489 [Kott]
• Lear and Edgar’s horror of sex; Edmund’s indfference
• Most profound alienatioin is from the bewilderment of excessive familial love 491 which offers only a choice between destructions
• The domestic is necessarily a tragedy 492
• Fool
• Nihilism and the four perspectives of Lear, Fool, Edmund and Edgar
• Lear is emblem of fatherhood
• Verbal force–crossing into realms of unsayable 494
• Fool as audience surrogate, mediates between Lear and audience, chorus
• Other thoughts about the fool
• Attack on feminist critics–Lears horror of feminity
• Edmund–represents Christopher Marlowe
• starts as a death wound
• ironic reversal
• Lear
• Suffering and the downward trajectory of life–no hope
• Hurt of Lears range of utterances–nb–see notes