engleski

World Gone Mad: A New Historicist Approach to Bastardy in Shakespeare's King Lear

This research focuses on William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear (1608/1623) in the broader historical context of Shakespeare’s time. By applying the new historicist theories, we focus on the issue of bastardy in the late Elizabethan England as well as the themes of property, territory, and power during the reign of King James I. Shakespeare was reportedly known for using multiple sources and documents of his contemporaries in order to ensure varying points of view and various interpretations of the literary material. Therefore, this study discusses the subplot-based character of Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, as a complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous character who is a product of his time but whose marginalized position allows him to cause radical changes within the existing social order. Edmund is at the same time a vital, energetic, and persevering force of progress and change, yet, due to the circumstances of his upbringing and the ambivalent attitudes towards bastardy and primogeniture at the time, his ultimate role as a villain facilitates the division of the kingdom. By creating cynical and outcast characters in Lear, Shakespeare juxtaposed two very different types of society, marked the transition from feudalism towards private property, anticipated the fragmenting of society and governing power during the English Civil War, and told a story which can be interpreted in modern circumstances and contexts influenced by the “law of nature, ” the fragmenting of power, and loss of decency and common sense. As a result, King Lear can be considered a document of its time. This is a testimony not only to Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature but also to his universal understanding of the times and circumstances of human condition.

King Lear, New Historicism, bastardy, Elizabethan and Jacobean England, co-text

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