How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
It is tempting to take the simplified approach to interpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear as presented in popular volumes of his plays such as grace the shelves of "world's greatest literature" series everywhere; at its most simplistic reading, the play is about how three different children - Regan, Goneril and Edmund - destroy their fathers (Black xxviii-xxix). It is a Victorian interpretation that works well as a cautionary morality tale - until one actually thinks about the entirety of King Lear and realizes that the fathers themselves go a good way toward ensuring the degeneration and destruction of their children. One's age, personal and in terms of era, indicate differing interpretations. Or, as Edmund notes in Lear, "men / Are as the time is" (V, iii, 30-31). Our "time" has seen critical interpretations of King Lear travel from turn-of-the-century Romanticism, through a period of psychoanalytic theory, through to post-Holocaust/Cold War existentialism.
The Romantic interpretation of King Lear was grounded in the performing traditions of the time. "Star vehicles" for the likes of Sir Henry Irving in the 1870s up through John Barrymore in the 1930s, Shakespeare's plays were platforms upon which grand gestures and a very British sense of imperial destiny pervaded the English-language consciousness. Often as not, the star was also the producer. The texts of these Romantic versions were cut to highlight the star-producer's role at the expense of all others. "Bernard Shaw would claim that [such a performer] couldn't play Shakespeare's characters but only versions of himself, and that he used Shakespeare's texts as mere quaries for the makings of original romantic dramas in which to exhibit characters of his own creation" (Shattuck 1810). Lear's rant at the storm was treated as the symbol - and cliche - of Romantic heroism fighting unbeatable odds:
Blow, winds, an...