William Shakespeare’s Tragedy ‘King Lear’ And Feminist Criticism

Abstract

Tragedy assumes the existence of ‘a permanent, universal and essentially unchanging human nature’ but the human nature implied in the moral and aesthetic satisfaction of tragedy is most  often explicitly male.  In King Lear for example, the narrative and its dramatisation present a connection between sexual insubordination and anarchy, and the connection is given an explicitly misogynist emphasis.  A feminist reading of the text cannot simply assert the countervailing rights of Goneril and Regan, for to do so would imply reverse the emotional structures of the play, associating feminist ideology with atavistic selfishness and the monstrous assertion of individual wills.  Feminism cannot simply take ‘the woman’s part’ when that part has been so morally loaded and theatrically circumscribed.  Not is any purpose served by merely denouncing the text’s misogyny, for King Lear’s position at the centre of the Shakespeare canon is assured by as continual reproduction in education and the theatre and is unlikely to be shifted by feminist sabre-rattling.