Critical Overview

The great nineteenth-century novelist Leo Tolstoy was very far from the nineteenthcentury consensus when he condemned King Lear, saying he felt ‘‘a boundless tedium,’’ when reading it, and also found the work ‘‘empty and offensive.’’ His position is even further from the position of contemporary critical opinion than it was at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1904, A. C. Bradley, who found structural difficulties in the last acts of King Lear because of the

double plot, bridged nineteenth and twentiethcentury Shakespeare criticism and placed King Lear at the top of the world’s literary pantheon:

When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind. . . . King Lear seems to me Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus [Prometheus Bound] and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.

King Lear has been considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest works at least as long ago as 1765 when Samuel Johnson wrote,

The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope.

Nineteenth-century critics of King Lear like W.A. Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and A. C. Swineburne all wrote of the play with awe as they considered its problems of hope, despair, evil, and suffering, and analyzed the depths of its characters. This sample from Charles Lamb can serve to illustrate the general tenor of the thoughts of the majority of nineteenth-century writers regarding King Lear:

The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood

seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.