“Without the form of justice”: Plainness and the Performance of Love in <i>King Lear</i>

Graham, Kenneth J. E.

doi:10.2307/2870463

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Accordingly, we have identified five additional characters known for their sincerity, as signalled by their associations with ‘blunt’ or ‘plain’ speaking (see, e.g. Cook, 1998; Graham, 1991; Grennan, 1987; Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, 2010) – Othello, Emilia, Humphrey, Brutus and Katherine 4. We will outline the extent to which they use the same language features as our five ‘deceptive’ characters in the sections that follow.…”

Section: Language Features Associated With Deceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Applied to our particular study, one would therefore expect that, if there is a stylistic difference between the language of characters who are speaking duplicitously and those who speak ‘plainly’ (see, e.g. Cook, 1998; Graham, 1991; Grennan, 1987; Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, 2010; and also Section 4), this is likely to appear as one or more keywords.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters

Archer

Gillings

2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, this article explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, Shakespeare’s depictions of five deceptive characters (Aaron, Tamora, Iago, Lady Macbeth and Falstaff). Our analysis adopts three strands: firstly, statistical keywords relating to each character are examined to determine what this tells us about their natures more generally. Secondly, the wordlists produced for each of the five characters are drawn upon to determine the extent to which they make use of linguistic features that have been correlated with, or linked to, acts of deliberate deception in real-world contexts. Thirdly, we make use of the results identified during the two aforementioned strands by using them to identify particular (sequences of) turns that are worthy of more detailed analysis. Here, we are primarily interested in (a) whether these keywords/deceptive indicators cluster or co-occur and (b) whether these interactions are the same as those identified by other scholars exploring depictions of deception in Shakespeare from a literary perspective. The findings indicate that deception-related features are indeed used collectively/in close proximity, by Shakespeare, at points where a character speaks to other characters disingenuously. They also suggest that Shakespeare’s deceptive depictions do change stylistically, from character to character, in line with those characters’ different characterisations and situations, that Shakespeare draws on atypical language features – such as self-oriented references – when it comes to some of his depictions of deception and that Shakespeare uses these various stylistic features to achieve a range of dramatic effect(s).

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Section: Language Features Associated With Deceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters

Archer

Gillings

2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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Speak What We Feel: Sympathy and Statecraft

Bailey

2017

Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts

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Ethics, Subjectivity, and Alterity in King Lear

Bidgoli

2021

Relig. Arts

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Cordelia’s defiance during the first scene of King Lear is among the thorniest issues in Lear criticism. There are also questions about her defiance in the first act and her sacrificial return in the fourth. Generally, critics either interpret her defiance negatively and condemn her (the question of her sacrifice remains equivocal), or they lay the blame on Lear’s absurdity and justify Cordelia’s silence (thus somehow explaining her sacrificial return). I will turn to the recent ethical approach to Lear in which critics usually treat Cordelia as an excess that both foregrounds the ethical themes of the play and resists our understanding. She is said to be like a trace, an evasive Other who can hardly be grasped or explicated. Her defiance and sacrifice thus mark her incomprehensibility and divinity. There are, however, problems and shortcomings with this view that I will enumerate and try to resolve here. I will mainly study Cordelia’s role and discuss her subjectivity with a closer attention. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, I suggest that Cordelia’s defiance/sacrifice is not simply a choice; she (dis)embodies a logic of heteronomy and absolute openness to and receptivity of the other, a passivity which is beyond any onto-political sense of passivity and activity. Her silence and sacrifice can be discussed as pre-voluntary, nonintentional sensibility. We can connect the dots to explain her defiant behavior in the first act and her sacrificial return in the last acts. Her uncanny ethicality will finally bridge the current gap and explain her alterity as the other as well. Hence she is both a responsive self and an uncanny other in a peculiar combination of qualities.

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“Without the form of justice”: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters

Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters

Speak What We Feel: Sympathy and Statecraft

Ethics, Subjectivity, and Alterity in King Lear

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