king lear

Lear Main Points

· Making sense as opposed to meaning. (In this reading is as creative as acting or directing. We can listen to baroque music on baroque instruments, but we can’t listen with baroque ears. Each age, each culture, & ultimately each individual will make sense of the text in their own way. This is a creative & an intellectual activity: our reading can be more or less creative; informed to a greater or lesser degree. A text as complex as Lear will yield an enormous, & constantly surprising range of meanings in its engagement with a creative intelligence. However, it will not yield meanings arbitrarily: Lear has an enormous integrity; an integrity which is not always well discerned or described by conventional criticism. [Overhead. Saying “nothing”. Constant discovery through performance.]

· Multiple interpretations. (Three aspects to this:
(a) Shakespeare’s texts are inherently likely to generate multiple meanings because of the habit he inher...