questions for April 19th

Posted on April 17, 2007

Do ONE:

1. I mentioned in class today (Tuesday) that productions of King Lear from about 1660 to 1810 or so were based on an adaptation of the play (written by Nahum Tate) rather than on Shakespeare's original. Among the very significant differences is that Cordelia does not die in Tate's version (in fact, Shakespeare is pretty much alone in having Cordelia die; in his own source material she does not die, so he obviously made the decision to "kill her" in much the same way he made that decision for Hamlet, who doesn't die in the source-versions of the story). So why do you think it is important, for Shakespeare (for tragedy) that Cordelia dies at the end? (If you want to experiment, you can ask yourself whether she is somehow functioning as a "surrogate victim" in Girard's sense, but that is a tricky idea.)

2. Explain how Booth's notion of "indefinition" is relevant to King Lear? Is this different from how he explained the term in relation to Macbeth?