10 - The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear

Summary

A common way to remember the history of writing about Shakespeare is to say that until Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy appeared in 1904, and culminating there, its main tradition had concentrated on Shakespeare's characters, while in recent generations emphasis has fallen on general patterns of meaning, systems of image or metaphor or symbol now taking the brunt of significance. Like most intellectual maps, this one is not only crude but fails worst in locating the figures one would like best to reach: Can Coleridge or Bradley really be understood as interested in characters rather than in the words of the play; or are the writings of Empson or G. Wilson Knight well used in saying that they are interested in what is happening in the words rather than what is happening in the speakers of the words? It is, however, equally easy and unhelpful to say that both ends of the tradition have been interested both in characters and in their words, first because this suggests that there are two things each end is interested in, whereas both would or should insist that they are interested only in one thing, the plays themselves; second, because there is clearly a shift in emphasis within that tradition, and a way of remarking that shift is to say that it moves away from studies of character into studies of words, and because such a shift raises problems of history and of criticism which ought not to be muffled in handy accommodations.