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- Title
“WHEREFORE TO DOVER?": SEEING NOTHING IN KING LEAR.
- Authors
Neill, Michael
- Abstract
King Lear is a play structured around the most brutal kinds of anti-climax. For its first audiences, schooled by earlier versions of the story – especially the old play with its elaborate romance ending – Shakespeare's repeated foreshadowings of a happy resolution must have seemed especially cruel. Instead the play seems to push towards a very different kind of “promised end": the apocalyptic catastrophe that so possessed the early modern imagination. Yet even this is withheld. This principle of frustrated expectation and evacuated meaning strikingly extends to the play's treatment of place, which takes advantage of the bareness of the early modern stage to dislocate the audience's imagination, leaving it without holdfast, suspended in a kind of un-space that Shakespeare mockingly calls “Dover."
- Subjects
KING Lear (Play : Shakespeare); ENDINGS (Motion pictures); ROMANCE films; SHAKESPEARE, William, 1564-1616 -- Film adaptations; HAPPY endings (Motion pictures); DRAMATURGICAL approach; SELF-consciousness (Awareness)
- Publication
Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature & Culture, 2016, Vol 26, Issue 52, p6
- ISSN
0862-8424
- Publication type
Article