d crack your cheeks! rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, [drown'd] the cocks!
You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! (III, i, 1-6)
Upon such a stage the Lear myth played well, if not the play per se: that of the old warrior fighting against the injustice of filial and political betrayal. The mythic version, in fact, found more favor with the likes of such literary giants as Leo Tolstoy than did Shakespeare's text (Kermode 1250). It was a very "Sturm un Drang" (Storm and Stress) interpretation; which is not surprising since the founders of Romanticism in the late 1700s took Shakespeare as one of their models. In the Victorian literary view, Shakespeare's plays were viewed more in terms of melodrama or, at best, "flawed" attempts at tragedy; certainly Lear does not stay within the boundaries of the classic "Unities" of Time, Place and Action.
Since the 1920s and continuing through to today, the influence of psychoanalysis upon the critical consciousness has led to a different, more naturalistic direction of Shakespearean interpretation in general, upon King Lear in specific. Freudian theory was first to take root. With its Oedipal and Orestian inferences, Freudian critical theory found fertile ground in Lear.
The basic theory of a psychoanalytical approach to any text holds that there are subliminal inferenc
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