As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. ― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Here’s a clear and helpful guide on how to quote Shakespeare.
And here’s the same professor’s clear guide on quoting prose.
Within the law there lies a fundamental paradox: law purports to protect people from violence but is itself violent in the process. Shakespeare threads the law’s violence throughout King Lear, employing shame-and-pain punishments—such as locking in the stocks and dismemberment—that move the narrative arc toward chaos and tragedy, rather than toward the stability that law promises. Thus, in King Lear, the law’s violence destabilizes, shocks, and disrupts instead of enacting the constructive aims of law to protect people’s safety and maintain order. Drawing on archival accounts of stocking, Justice of the Peace manuals, and historical evidence of the early modern state’s discretionary powers to punish, this essay contextualizes the force of law in King Lear as distinctly chaotic, weakening the state and discrediting its agents.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, 1835
The story of Lear and his daughters was left by Shakespeare exactly as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristical of the simplicity of old times. But in that tradition there is not the slightest trace of the story of Gloster and his sons, which was derived by Shakespeare from another source. The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue or the denouement must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloster for the fate of Lear becomes the means which enables his son Edmund to effect his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the saviour of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril; and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. The laws of the drama have therefore been sufficiently complied with; but that is the least; it is the very combination which constitutes the sublime beauty of the work. The two cases resemble each other in the main: an infatuated father is blind towards his well-disposed child, and the unnatural children, whom he prefers, requite him by the ruin of all his happiness. But all the circumstances are so different, that these stories, while they each make a correspondent impression on the heart, form a complete contrast for the imagination. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world: the picture becomes gigantic, and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall fro their appointed orbits.
The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate, Penguin, 1997, p. 383.
King James I of England (as of 1603), King James VI of Scotland
I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head, and it is my body; I am the shepherd, and it is my flock. I hope therefore that no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I that am a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives; that I being the head, should have a divided and monstrous body
“It was a very pleasant sport to see,” the Elizabethan court official Robert Laneham wrote of a 1575 bear-baiting. “To see the bear, with his pink eyes, tearing after his enemies’ approach…with biting, with clawing, with roaring, with tossing and tumbling, he would work and wind himself from them. And when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and the slather hanging about his physiognomy.”
For the first Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles….
A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue….
In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.
The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, London, 1765, p. 207.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, 1835
The story of Lear and his daughters was left by Shakespeare exactly as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristical of the simplicity of old times. But in that tradition there is not the slightest trace of the story of Gloster and his sons, which was derived by Shakespeare from another source. The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue or the denouement must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloster for the fate of Lear becomes the means which enables his son Edmund to effect his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the saviour of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril; and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. The laws of the drama have therefore been sufficiently complied with; but that is the least; it is the very combination which constitutes the sublime beauty of the work. The two cases resemble each other in the main: an infatuated father is blind towards his well-disposed child, and the unnatural children, whom he prefers, requite him by the ruin of all his happiness. But all the circumstances are so different, that these stories, while they each make a correspondent impression on the heart, form a complete contrast for the imagination. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world: the picture becomes gigantic, and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall from their appointed orbits.
The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate, Penguin, 1997, p. 383.
Jonathan Dollimore, 2004
King Lear is, above all, a play about power, property, and inheritance.
Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Jonathan Dollimore, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1999, p. 190.
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (Foucault, 1984).
Measure for Measure with Romola Garai Premieres Friday, October 19 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings) Streams Saturday, October 20 at pbs.org/shakespeareuncovered and on PBS apps
Measure for Measure takes an astonishingly timely look at sexual morality, hypocrisy and harassment. Shakespeare asks us to “measure” the price of liberty against the moral and social cost of libertinism. It’s a play about vice, the law and sexual corruption at the highest levels and, for nearly two centuries, it was considered too racy to be produced on the English stage. Garai explains why there is no light-hearted happy ending in this play, but something much darker and more complex — truly a sexual tale for our time.
