You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a review of the current Royal Shakespeare production of King Lear at Stratford on Avon in the Times Literary Supplement of May 28, 1993, Alan Sinfield, a cutting-edge literary critic, takes the production to task because in it “the personal histories [of the characters] are centre-stage: the war seems a background to them.” He compares it unfavorably to a 1982 production in which the war—presumably the war between Cordelia and Goneril and Regan but also the 1982 Falkland war—was indeed the thing, for he feels that King Lear is about “the potential for violence which you get within the absolute State” and the abuse of patriarchal power in a society gone wrong. He finds that the director's staging of the play as a drama of “domestic relations” and “interpersonal spite-fulness” to be “Oprah Winfrey dramatized” (p. 19).
I'm afraid he would have the same harsh words for Bernard Paris's Bargains with Fate: Psychological Crises and Conflicts in Shakespeare and His Plays, for Paris is of the same school as the evidently politically incorrect director of the Royal Shakespeare production. For he, too, definitively puts Shakespeare's characters, their “domestic relations,” and their “interpersonal spitefulness” center stage. Paris unashamedly and insightfully celebrates Shakespeare's capacity for a mimetic, psychologically rich and complex representation of character, and his book offers a detailed psychoanalytic investigation of the major Shakespearean characters. Furthermore, he uses his investigations of the plays to speculate about Shakespeare the author and his psychological development. In both of these endeavors, he sets himself unfashionably against the current trends of literary criticism and Shakespearean scholarship. Perhaps that is why he addresses his book primarily to “students and lovers of Shakespeare,” to “actors…and directors who want to stage Shakespeare's plays as dramas about human beings”