Free English Literature Dissertations - The Dialectics Of Death In William Shakespeare’s Play King Lear 2005
THE DIALECTICS OF DEATH IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S PLAY KING LEAR
2005
Introduction
In the times of Elizabethan ruling English literature was overwhelmed with certain mortal images that, according to Michael Neill, constituted the principal concept of the early modern thinking the aesthetics of death1. Such preoccupation of death reflected the wide spread of the strict religious dogmas that became especially popular in England during the Renaissance; it was in that period when the country began to experience persecutions of Protestants, murders of Jesuits and Catholics that continued till the end of the seventeenth century. As Houlbrooke points out, the death rates in early modern England were considerably increased due to famine and plague; no other European country of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries revealed so high mortality rates2. As a result, death was gradually transformed from a simple natural phenomenon into a specific social culture that influenced various aspects of English life. According to Nigel Llewellyn, Images reminding people about their own mortality were to be found in all kinds of public and private situations In Early Modern England, Death always accompanied the individual on the streets or at home3. Simultaneously, preoccupation of death was intensified by the formation of a new philosophical direction that considerably influenced Shakespeare’s tragedies Stoicism. Placing fortune at the centre of a person’s life, Stoics nevertheless regarded death as an individual choice of a person and believed that the way person lived influenced his/her death. Stoicism supported the notion that the thoughts of death should not be suppressed, instead they should exist in a person’s consciousness; however, with the formation of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century new contemporary concepts of death began to emerge on the scene. Psychoanalytic theories started to replace the ideas of the early modern thinkers by pointing at the unconscious desires of people for death; these theories rejected the Renaissance thinking, trying to prove that people suppressed all thoughts of death, and this suppression influenced their treatment of the issues of death. This new interpretation of the death argument had a profound impact on a literary analysis of certain classical literary works.
Thus, the aim of this paper is two-fold: 1) to discuss the treatment of death in William Shakespeare’s play King Lear and evaluate its contribution to the concepts of such early modern philosophers as Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Thomas More and Jacques Choron and; 2) to differentiate between the concepts of the early modern thinkers and the theories created by the twentieth-century psychologists and philosophers, such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, George Bataille and Martin Heidegger, revealing how Shakespeare’s play interacts and develops out of the early modern thinking.
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