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- Title
Naked Lear.
- Authors
Bell, Millicent
- Abstract
This article deals with the dramatization of skepticism about selfhood in the play King Lear by William Shakespeare. The play's conspicuous imagery of clothing has been noticed, but not what it signifies. It has not been recognized how the imagery enforces the implication that most of the human qualities that make up personhood are things put on or taken off. In a play, costume is sometimes the disguise of a disguiser, doubling its function as a dramatic fiction, a misrepresentation of the person of the actor. The actor who continues to be recognized by the audience as the character met before is dressed so that he appears as someone else on the stage. King Lear's two disguised comrades in suffering go undetected by those around them. But Shakespeare forces even the theater spectator to put aside his knowledge of their real identity. Disguise has expanded the dramatis personae to include two new characters. The new clothing has become transformative. Kent, a senior earl and the king's chief adviser, becomes a rough, plainspeaking service-man whose renunciation of courtly being and style is a significant changeover. Edgar, the heir of the Earl of Gloucester, is metamorphosed into a ragged vagrant whose condition as poor Tom precipitates the vision of absolute nakedness in Lear.
- Subjects
LEAR, King of England (Legendary character); SHAKESPEARE, William, 1564-1616; PERSONA (Literature); BRITISH folklore; COSTUME
- Publication
Raritan, 2004, Vol 23, Issue 4, p55
- ISSN
0275-1607
- Publication type
Article