Reason's Rhetoric

Modern Shakespearean critics have often been caught in a struggle on two fronts. In their efforts to come to grips directly with a text, they have had to fight a rear guard action against the critical tradition within which they operate, a tradition which has tended to supplant the original work with its own presence. In other words, modernist criticism has provided texts which, functionally speaking, draw attention to themselves and away from the plays. Recent criticism of King Lear presents a powerful example of this process. It has been impelled to operate as much in relation to the abstract idealism and the subjectivism of earlier criticism as to the play as a literary or historical event. In this essay I want to give some examples of this (negative) dialectic and also provide a reading of King Lear that will, I hope, comment on the play and on the metaphysics of the modernist tradition at the same time. Others before me have already pointed out that modern criticism of King Lear tends to insist that we look at the play in terms of the metaphysical statement it makes.1 Indeed, G. Wilson Knight, one of the early, powerful spokesmen for this tradition, claims that a true must be centered on the imaginative qualities of Shakespeare.... And interpretation must be metaphysical... (WF

Aesthetics · Art · Irony · Linguistics · Literature · Rhetoric · Sociology · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism