“Take (Meta)physic, pomp”: King Lear and (Dis)oriented Ontology

Shakespeare , Buddha , and King Lear Melvin Sterne

Given Shakespeare's status as "the secular Bible," it is surprising that his work has not been examined more closely to consider its spiritual teachings. As Buddhist studies increase in popularity in the West, more and more Buddhist scholars are being drawn to evaluate Shakespeare's work in light of Buddhist traditions. Of special interest today is the perception of Shakespeare's works as point...

Tragic Pleasure in Shakespeare's King Lear and Othello

Introduction The consideration of tragic pleasure is old, harkening back to contemporary critique of Greek tragedy. It is reasonable, however, to believe that no one, from then to now, has been able to deliberate upon the subject of delight in the portrayal of suffering while excluding all reference to reader response. Even if only implicitly conveyed, the focus of tragic pleasure is studying w...

Metaphorized Animals: an Investigation of Animal Metaphors in King Lear

Conceptual Theory of Metaphor (CTM), first proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is an approach to metaphor which releases it from the bounds of language and instead places it in the domain of cognition. According to this approach, metaphor and cognition are in a bilateral relationship, that is, each metaphor has a cognitive basis and conceptualization in the mind mostly takes place via metaph...

King Lear — centring on the theme of “Nothing”

Between Athens and Jerusalem: King Lear and the Morality of Tragedy

Is classical tragedy contingent upon a Greco-Roman sense of morality? Or can tragedy exist within a Judeo-Christian universe as well? Literary critic Northrop Frye’s theory of high-mimetic tragedy inherits distinctions that Aristotle draws between tragedy and comedy in the Poetics. As a brief philological excursion will demonstrate, the binary distinctions upon which Aristotle builds his tragic...