King Lear

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Yan Brailowsky
King Lear
William Shakespeare
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Sommaire
Introduction
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Le problème éditorial
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Lecture détaillée
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Les enjeux dramatiques
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Remarques sur l’organisation du volume
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Remerciements
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Chapter 1 – “King Lear: What Is It About?”
Of endings and beginnings
1.1 “Is this the promised end?”
1.1.1 Ambiguous endings and conflicting texts
1.1.1.1 The deaths of Lear, Leir, Leire and Leyr compared
1.1.1.2 Editing Lear: the ending in Q1, F, Arden and Oxford
1.1.2 Redemption or Apocalypse?
1.1.2.1 The Book of Revelation as ultimate ending
1.1.2.2 “Produce the bodies, be they alive or dead”
1.1.3 Literary constructs: “the sense of an ending”
1.1.3.1 History and tragedy: theories on genre
1.1.3.2 King Lear as “fiction”
1.2 “Prophecy after the event”
1.2.1 Beginnings
1.2.1.1 Differences between the sources, Q1 and F
1.2.1.2 A surprisingly quick succession
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King Lear
1.2.2 What happens before the play starts?
1.2.2.1 What we know of Lear
1.2.2.2 What we know of Lear and Gloucester’s children
1.2.3 Does Act 1 really announce what comes next?
1.2.3.1 The “missing middle”
1.2.3.2 Entelechy, dramatic irony and prolepsis vs. fictional endings
1.3 Pour aller plus loin
Bibliographie
Questions pour approfondir la réflexion
Chapter 2 – Plots and subplots
2.1 Structure and analogy
2.1.1 Origins and function of the Gloucester subplot
2.1.1.1 Sidney’s Arcadia and the Prince of Paphlagonia
2.1.1.2 Dramatizing the subplot: from pastoral to tragedy
2.1.1.3 The subplot’s “function(s)”, “double” plots and Lear’s “unity”
2.1.2 Sight and blindness: conventional tragic metaphors?
2.2 Lear’s adjuvants, Cordelia and the Fool
2.2.1 Youth vs. old age: Cordelia as “infant” and “child”
2.2.2 Of fools and folly
2.2.2.1 From “court fool” to stage Fool
2.2.2.2 Interpreting the Fool’s prophecy: Merlin and merismus
2.2.2.3 The Fool: Lear’s double?
2.2.3 Cordelia and the Fool: doubling roles?
2.2.3.1 Disregarding age and gender
2.2.3.2 “Foolish honesty”: truth-telling and paradoxy
2.3 Pour aller plus loin
Bibliographie
Questions pour approfondir la réflexion
Chapter 3 – The purposes of division: (family) politics
3.1 Topicality: taking lessons from History
3.1.1 A cruel play for cruel times
3.1.2 Decolonization and Lear: what dividing “all” means
3.1.3 From Stonehenge to Hobbes
3.2 A Jacobean crisis of the king’s two bodies?
3.2.1 From the Middle Ages to James’s Basilikon Doron
3.2.2 Division and schize: gazing at the Other
3.3 Pour aller plus loin
Bibliographie
Questions pour approfondir la réflexion
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Sommaire
Chapter 4 – Bastardy
4.1 From medieval Vice to modern Machiavelli
4.1.1 “In everything illegitimate”: subverting primogeniture
4.1.2 Astrology, Nature and property
4.2 Rethinking bastardy
4.2.1 Treacherous and intercepted letters
4.2.2 The fear of uncertain origin(s)
4.3 Pour aller plus loin
Bibliographie
Questions pour approfondir la réflexion
Chapitre 5 – De la motion à l’émotion
5.1 Exils
5.1.1 Aux origines de l’exil : le pharmakos et la Genèse
5.1.2 De l’exil à l’errance, ou l’émotion dans l’espace
5.2 Interpréter la (dé)possession
5.2.1 Possession démoniaque
5.2.2 « Reason in madness »
5.3 Pour aller plus loin
Bibliographie
Questions pour approfondir la réflexion
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Conclusion
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Bibliographie
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