Elizabethan drama, pathetic vehemence (sometimes called bathos); kind of inverted prosopopeia (personification of an abstraction), addressing to the heart a ...
Source: Première leçon sur: The Tragedy of King Lear, Henri Suhamy, Ellipses.
! KL appears as a kinf of Gothic fresco, a microcosm in which all estates and types are represented (characters). ! Prose is abundant: amounts to 26% of the total text --> this is high on the whole for a tragedy. ! The verse is more variegated (diversifié) than in any other Sh tragedy. ! Oh me, my heart! My rising heart! But down ! (Lear 2.2.310): typical of Elizabethan drama, pathetic vehemence (sometimes called bathos); kind of inverted prosopopeia (personification of an abstraction), addressing to the heart a passionate and theatrical invocation. ! The play teems with vociferous exclamations --> typical of senecan tragedy. ! Lear’s histrionic (overly theatrical or melodramatic in character or style) attitude. Self-pity leading to self-dramatization. ! KL is a loud play: many outcries and invectives. ! Reagan‘s and G’s speeches to the king in 1.1 can be read as as parodies of the genre called panegyric (speech in praise of someone). ! Usual Shakesperian mannerism and figures of speech: Metonymies: ! A word used instead of another. ! 1.1.6: Curiosity in neither: a cavalling request ! to shake all cares and business from our age (1.1.38): our aged person. ! Etc ! Think’est thou that duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery
bows? To plainness honour’s bound When majesty falls to folly: (1.1.148) abstract
words duty, power, flattery, honor, majesty are personified and allegorized by Kent. This voc testifies to the imptce given by Shak to the moral issues of the drama. The psce of no less than 8 abstract substantives in so short a passage appears impressive. ! Hendiadys: expression of a single idea by 2 words connected with and: nice and
warm, when one could be used to modify the other: nicely warm. ! 1.2.173: the image, and horror of it: the horrible image: replacing the adjective by another noun, the author cancels this relationship: such figures of speecj require some attention from the mind, but also from sensibility & imagination. ! Regan’s insincere profession of filial love produces an effect of rhetoric within the rhetoric, as her painstaking phraseology sounds superposed to the elaborate oratory of the play. (theater within theater?) ! Devices that carry terseness (concision) sometimes to obscurity or ungrammatical syntaxt. ! Another example of that: Anacoluthons: construction that lacks grammatical sequence. (cf 2.2.401). Antithesis: ! Paradoxical teaching of the play: sometimes words and appearances prove to mean the contrary of what is superficially believed and construed. ! Cordelia constantly associated with antitheses, as she is a creature of paradoxes for people who don’t understand her. ! Her materia poverty results from her inward richness, and her being rejected by a sty cultivating false values and fake appearances makes her worthy of a man in quest of real virtue (France). Birlesque features: ! Puns and conceits. A conceit: various kinds of phrases combining wit and wordplay.
