Email this article Lear and the learned Theban
Abstract
Abstract - The affinities between Shakespeare’s King Lear and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and in particular the pattern of allusion to eyes and to eyesight developed in both plays, is familiar critical terrain. The purpose of this essay is to consider in a somewhat broader perspective King Lear’s relation not only with Oedipus the King, but with the entire group of works generally referred to as the Theban plays. Elements in common between the works by Shakespeare and Sophocles, among which are the eyesight motif and its symbolic connotations, the figures of devoted daughters, a concern with relationships between parents and children, and an interest in what constitutes real knowledge of the self and of the world, are discussed in the first section of the essay. The question of why such parallels should exist, and in particular of whether Shakespeare knew Sophocles’ works either at first hand or as mediated through the derivative plays of Seneca, is investigated in the second part, while in the third the symbolic implications of the sight pattern shared by the works are examined in depth.
Keywords: Shakespeare, Sophocles, King Lear, Theban plays, Oedipus.References
Anon. 2002, King Leir, ed. Tiffany Stern, Nick Hern, London.
Baldwin, T. W. 1944, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana.
Bate, J. 2008, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, Viking, London.
Cicero, M. T. 1971, Selected Works, trans. Michael Grant. Penguin, London.
Florio, J. 1965, Montaigne’s Essays, trans. John Florio, Dent, London.
Fraser, R. 1992, Shakespeare: The Later Years, Columbia Univ. Press, New York.
Harvey, J. 1977, A Note on Shakespeare and Sophocles, “Essays in Criticism” 27, pp. 259-270.
Heilman, R. B. 1963, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear, Univ. of Washington Press, Wash-ington.
Highet, G. 1985, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Oxford Univ. Press, New York.
Jones, E. 1976, Hamlet and Oedipus, Norton, New York.
Jonson, B. 1999, Sejanus, His Fall, ed. Philip J. Ayers, Manchester Univ. Press, Manchester.
Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson. 2003, Metaphors We Live By, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lakoff, G. & M. Turner. 1989, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Lloyd-Jones, H. 1997, Introduction to Sophocles: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus (Loeb Classical Library), Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Lupton, J. R. & K. Reinhard. 1993, After Oedipus, Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis, Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca.
McLuhan, M. 1969, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, New American Library, New York.
McPeek, J. A. S. 1972, The Psyche Myth and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Shakespeare Quarterly” 23, pp. 69-79.
Montaigne, M. 1991. The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech, Penguin, London.
Muir, K. 1993, Introduction to the Arden Edition of King Lear, Routledge, London.
Pratt, N. T. 1965, From Oedipus to Lear, “The Classical Journal” 61, pp. 49-57.
Schlegel, A. W. 1904, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, George Bell & Sons, Lon-don.
Seneca. 1887, The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca, Translated into English, Spenser Society, Manchester.
Shakespeare, W. 2001. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson & David Scott Kastan, Thomson Learning, London.
Shakespeare, W. 2006, The Complete Works, eds Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor, 2nd ed., Oxford Univ. Press, Ox-ford.
Sidney, P. 2008, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.
Smith, G. G. (ed.) 1967, Elizabethan Critical Essays. Vol. II. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.
Sophocles. 1973, The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Sophocles. 1994, The Theban Plays, trans. David Grene, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Sophocles. 1997, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus (Loeb Classical Library), trans. and ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Sophocles. 1998, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus (Loeb Classical Library), trans. and ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Sweetser, E. 1991, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural aspects of Semantic Structure, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.
Wells, S. 2001, Oxford World’s Classics edn. of King Lear, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.
Wells, S. 2006, General Introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds Stanley Wells et al, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.
Winston, J. 2006, Seneca in Early Elizabethan England, “Renaissance Quarterly” 59, pp. 29-58.
Zak, W. F. 1984, Sovereign Shame: A Study of “King Lear”, Bucknell Univ. Press, Lewisburg.
Full Text: pdf
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
