King Lear: Interpretations (OCR A Level English Literature): Revision Note

Interpretations

AO5 assesses your ability to understand different ways of reading and interpreting texts. Those different readings can take different forms, from interpretations discussed by different members of your class, to reading and using published critical material, to watching and analysing different productions of the play.

There are numerous ways to explore "different interpretations" to meet the AO5 criterion, and you must engage with a range of secondary readings to supplement your own understanding of the text. These can include:

• Exploring critics

• Interpretations over time

• Dramatisations

Exploring critics

Different critics will offer varied insights and interpretations of King Lear, and citing them will lend credibility and authority to your analysis. Referencing well-known critics demonstrates that your interpretation is grounded in literary criticism, and enhances the validity of your argument. Using critics who approach the play differently allows you to introduce alternative interpretations and develop your own argument in response to them.

Below are some notable critics who have commented on King Lear:

A.C. Bradley (1851–1935)

• Bradley, a British literary scholar, established much of the twentieth century's approach to King Lear through his enormously influential 1904 lectures, published as Shakespearean Tragedy

• He approaches the play through character psychology, treating Lear, Gloucester, Goneril, Regan, Edmund and the others as coherent individuals whose inner lives can be reconstructed and analysed, an approach that dominated Shakespeare criticism for much of the century that followed

• Bradley describes King Lear as "certainly the most terrible picture that Shakespeare painted of the world", arguing that "in no other of his tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly bad"

• Despite this bleakness, Bradley does not read the play as offering no moral order at all:

  • He notes that the play's villains, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall and Oswald, are "all dead a few weeks after we see them first", arguing it therefore "seems odd to describe King Lear as 'a play in which the wicked prosper'"

  • For Bradley, "the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to it", suggesting a form of moral order operating beneath the play's surface cruelty

• Bradley is also notable for openly ranking King Lear below Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth as a piece of drama, even while calling it Shakespeare's "greatest achievement", arguing its sheer scale makes it difficult to stage convincingly

Jan Kott (1914–2001)

• Kott, a Polish critic and theorist writing after the Second World War, offers one of the most influential twentieth-century readings of the play in his essay "King Lear or Endgame", collected in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964)

• Kott reads King Lear through the lens of Samuel Beckett's absurdist theatre, arguing that Shakespeare's tragedy has more in common with Beckett's Endgame than with classical tragedy:

  • He argues that in modern "grotesque" drama, suffering occurs without any relation to a higher, meaningful order, unlike traditional tragedy, in which a hero's suffering is at least meaningful within a moral universe

  • Kott identifies the mock-suicide scene between Gloucester and Edgar at Dover as the clearest expression of this idea, presenting Gloucester as an “everyman” figure adrift in a world where "both the medieval and renaissance orders of established values disintegrate"

• Kott's reading had a major influence on Peter Brook's 1971 film, discussed further below 

Harold Bloom (1930–2019)

• Bloom, an American literary critic and professor at Yale, wrote extensively on King Lear across several books, and is one of the most widely cited modern critics of Shakespeare generally

• Bloom focuses closely on Lear's fall from absolute authority, describing his decision to divide the kingdom while still expecting to be treated as king as "sheer hubris":

  • He notes the irony that Lear was never really in control even while he held power, observing that for sixty years "Lear's flatterers told him he was everything in himself, but he has learned nothing"

• For Bloom, Lear's madness is productive rather than simply tragic: it is only once Lear has lost every marker of his former authority that he is forced to confront what a human being actually is, stripped of rank or title

Interpretations over time

Interpretations of King Lear have evolved dramatically over time, arguably more than almost any other Shakespeare play, since the version of the play performed on English stages for over 150 years was not, in fact, the one Shakespeare wrote. Below are some examples of how interpretations, and even the text itself, have changed across different periods.

Jacobean context: early 17th century

• King Lear was first performed around 1606, for an audience that would have understood Lear's abdication as a disruption of the divinely sanctioned social order, not simply a family drama:

  • There were two distinct versions of the play, one from the Quarto (1608) and one from the Folio (1623)

• The bleakness of the original ending, in which both Lear and Cordelia die, appears to have unsettled its earliest audiences considerably; this may have contributed to the play falling out of favour within a few decades of its first performance

The Restoration adaptation: Nahum Tate, 1681

• In 1681, the poet and playwright Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear almost entirely:

  • His version removed the Fool from the play completely, invented a romantic relationship between Edgar and Cordelia, and, most significantly, gave the play a happy ending in which both Lear and Cordelia survive

• Tate defended these changes in his dedication to the published text, describing Shakespeare's original as "a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished", suggesting he saw himself as improving and completing the play rather than damaging it

• Tate's version was so successful that it entirely replaced Shakespeare's own text on the English stage for over 150 years

• This dominance had a direct effect on how the play was read and criticised during this period:

  • The essayist Charles Lamb, wrote in 1811 that "the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted", and that watching the play performed produced "nothing... but what is painful and disgusting"

  • This was stated about a performance of Tate's version rather than Shakespeare's, since Shakespeare's ending was not being staged at the time

• Edmund Kean restored Shakespeare’s tragic ending in 1823, and the actor William Charles Macready restored the Fool in 1838

• In 1810 the play was kept off the stage entirely out of deference to King George III’s mental illness

Why Tate's version endured for so long

• Tate's happy ending suited the tastes and expectations of Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences, who generally expected drama to demonstrate that virtue is ultimately rewarded

• Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765, admitted that he found Cordelia's death so distressing that he "was many years... so shocked" by it that he struggled even to reread the closing scenes as an editor, suggesting the emotional discomfort caused by Shakespeare's ending was widely shared

• Tate's ending also reflected different assumptions about tragedy itself, particularly the expectation that dramatic suffering should ultimately be resolved

Twentieth-century readings

• A.C. Bradley's character-focused, psychologically driven reading dominated academic criticism for much of the early twentieth century, treating the play primarily as a study of individual moral failure and suffering

• Later in the century, Jan Kott's absurdist reading shifted critical and theatrical interpretation away from Bradley's focus on individual character:

  • It moved towards a bleaker, more philosophical reading of the play as a study of meaningless suffering in an indifferent universe

• Harold Bloom's later criticism returned attention to Lear's own psychology and language, particularly his loss of authority:

  • This did so through close reading of specific words and phrases rather than Bradley's more general character study, showing that even critics working within a broadly similar tradition can approach the same play very differently

Dramatisations

Dramatisations of King Lear convey different readings and interpretations of the text. Directors and actors make choices regarding performance, setting, costume and characterisation, all of which can influence an audience's understanding of the play. There are many different dramatisations of King Lear which present diverse readings of the play's characters and themes.

Examining various productions of King Lear will help you appreciate different interpretations of the characters and themes, and how these interpretations have evolved over time, reflecting shifts in society and culture. Below are two examples of very different productions, though you should aim to watch a range of stage and film performances to help inform your own interpretation.

King Lear: Peter Brook (1971)

• Peter Brook's film adaptation, starring Paul Scofield as Lear, is widely regarded as one of the most significant screen versions of the play, and is directly indebted to Jan Kott's essay discussed above:

  • Brook had already directed a stage version of the play influenced by Kott's ideas, and his 1971 film developed this bleak, modern interpretation further 

• Shot in stark black and white on the freezing dunes of Denmark's Jutland peninsula, the film is deliberately austere:

  • There is no musical score

  • The bleak, wintry landscape does not visually deteriorate alongside Lear's suffering the way a more traditional staging might, since the world of the film is presented as bleak and hostile from its very first images

• Brook's interpretation deliberately avoids sentimentalising Lear:

  • It presents Scofield's performance as demanding and difficult rather than simply a "poor old white-haired patriarch", which makes the audience's early sympathy for Goneril and Regan considerably more plausible than in more traditional productions

• The film has been praised as one of the great cinematic Shakespeare adaptations, but has also been criticised for its unrelenting bleakness, with some critics arguing that its refusal to distinguish between the violence of "good" and "evil" characters flattens some of the play's moral distinctions

King Lear: Deborah Warner, Old Vic (2016)

• Deborah Warner's modern-dress stage production cast Glenda Jackson in the title role

• This casting was not a gender-swap of the character in the way some modern Shakespeare productions rework a role entirely: 

  • Lear remained textually male, referred to with male pronouns throughout, with Jackson performing the part rather than the character being rewritten as female

• Critics widely praised the way the production allowed gender to become almost incidental to the performance, with Jackson's physically slight frame read instead as an emblem of Lear's vulnerability once stripped of power, rather than as a comment on womanhood specifically

• The production's design was sparse and deliberately theatrical, and included deliberately provocative choices, such as Gloucester's eyeball being thrown out into the audience during his blinding, which some critics felt tipped into gimmickry

• This production is useful for considering gender in performance: 

  • Jackson played Lear as a male character, but her casting encouraged audiences to reconsider the relationship between Lear's authority, age and physical vulnerability 

Using critics and productions alongside your own interpretation can help you develop a more convincing AO5 argument. It is worth remembering that interpretations, whether from critics, historical audiences or directors, are shaped by the specific geographic, historical, political, social and literary contexts in which they were produced. King Lear's own performance history, in which the "wrong" ending was the only one audiences knew for over 150 years, is one of the clearest demonstrations in the whole of Shakespeare's work of how much interpretation can shape what a text is even understood to say.

Sources

Bradley, A.C. (1904) Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. London: Macmillan.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16966/16966-h/16966-h.htm (opens in a new tab)
Bloom, H. (2010) ‘William Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House
https://www.scribd.com/document/496663973/Bloom-s-Modern-Critical-Interpretations-Harold-Bloom-William-Shakespeare-s-King-Lear-Blooms-Literary-Criticism-2010 (opens in a new tab)
Brook, P. (dir.) (1971) King Lear [Film]. United Kingdom: Filmways/Columbia Pictures.
Folger Shakespeare Library (n.d.) ‘King Lear – Entire Play’.
https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/king-lear/read/ (opens in a new tab)
Gross, T. (2023) ‘We ask the creator of Succession everything you wanted to know about the finale’, Fresh Air, NPR, 5 June.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/05/1179595456/jesse-armstrong-succession-interview (opens in a new tab) 
Kott, J. (1964) Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London: Methuen.
Lamb, C. (1811) ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’, The Reflector.
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14129/pg14129-images.html (opens in a new tab)
LaGrand, A.E. (2020) ‘William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s King Lear’, Folger Shakespeare Library, 18 August
https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/william-charles-macready-king-lear-restoration/ (opens in a new tab)
O’Toole, F. (2016) ‘Glenda Jackson’s Great Lear’, The New York Review of Books, 22 December.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/glenda-jackson-great-king-lear/ (opens in a new tab)
Shakespeare, W. (1951) ‘King Lear’, in P. Alexander (ed.) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text. London: Collins [SME Digital Texts Library edition]
Tate, N. (1681) The History of King Lear. London.
https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Tate-Lr_M/index.html (opens in a new tab)
Warner, D. (dir.) (2016) King Lear [Stage production]. London: Old Vic.
Willemen, P. (1983) ‘Peter Brook’s King Lear: Aesthetic Achievement or Far Side of the Moon?’, Theatre Research International, 8(3), pp. 173–186.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/theatre-research-international/article/peter-brooks-king-lear-aesthetic-achievement-or-far-side-of-the-moon/75949D9D1DA4450D8F7E4DA5963B07E8 (opens in a new tab)