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The great nineteenth-century novelist Leo Tolstoy was very far from the nineteenth-century consensus when he condemned King Lear, saying he felt ''a boundless tedium,'' when reading it, and also found the work ''empty and offensive.'' His position is even further from the position of contemporary critical opinion than it was at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1904, A. C. Bradley, who found structural difficulties in the last acts of King Lear because of the double plot, bridged nineteenth and twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism and placed King Lear at the top of the world's literary pantheon:

When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind. . . . King Lear seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus [Prometheus Bound] and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.

King Lear has been considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works at least as long ago as 1765 when Samuel Johnson wrote,

The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope.

Nineteenth-century critics of King Lear like W.A. Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and A. C. Swineburne all wrote of the play with awe as they considered its problems of hope, despair, evil, and suffering, and analyzed the depths of its characters. This sample from Charles Lamb can serve to illustrate the general tenor of the thoughts of the majority of nineteenth-century writers regarding King Lear:

The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.

In the twentieth century, the introduction of psychoanalytic inquiry and, especially Sigmund Freud's own use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural symbols, including King Lear, gave new impetus and a new technique for the study of Shakespeare's characters. For Freud, Cordelia embodied the silence of Death. Scholars in the twentieth century also sought to understand King Lear as an intellectual statement about the nature of Nature itself, as John Danby did in Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature. The drama has also been seen as a commentary about the nature of being-in-the-world, about what comprises being human, about the benevolence or malevolence or even the non-existence of providence, of goodness, of charity, and of hope. The inquiry into the play's vision of the place of the gods in the motives of mankind perhaps reached its peak--it is doubtful it reached its conclusion--with William Elton's study King Lear and the Gods, in which he argues against the position advanced by a number of Shakespeare scholars, like Kenneth Myrick, who argued that within the tragedy and bleakness of experience in King Lear, there is redemption, salvation, and marks of Christian optimism. By the last decades of the century, techniques like the New Historicism focused less on the meaning of King Lear as it might be revealed through a study of its themes, structure, images, and characters, and more on understanding the play in terms of its own time, how it fit into, interacted with, and appeared in its own original historical context. Thus Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., writing in 1995, examines the events of King Lear in ''King Lear in Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes'' in the context of the stoicism of Seneca and Montaigne. In 2001, Terry Reilly brought a study of inheritance laws and customs practiced in the Kent district of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bear on a reading of the play in ''King Lear: The Kentish Forest and the Problem of Thirds.''

Bibliography:

1) Bevington, David, ed., ''Canon, Dates, and Early Texts: Appendix 1,'' in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1980, pp. 1623-24.

2) Bradley, A. C., ''Lecture VII: King Lear,'' in Shakespearean Tragedy, Fawcett Publications, 1986, p. 201.

3) Danby, John F., Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, Faber and Faber, 1949.

4) Elton, William R., King Lear and the Gods, Huntington Library, 1966.

5) Freud, Sigmund, ''The Theme of the Three Caskets,'' in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, edited by Benjamin Nelson, Harper Torchbooks, 1958, p. 75.

6) Johnson, Samuel, ''On King Lear,'' in Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism, Discus Books, 1965, p. 490.

7) Myrick, Kenneth, ''Christian Pessimism in King Lear,'' in Shakespeare, 1564-1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, Brown University Press, 1964, pp. 56-70.

8) Reilly, Terry, ''King Lear: The Kentish Forest and the Problem of Thirds,'' Oklahoma City University Law Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2001.

9) Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr., ''King Lear in Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes,'' in Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), p. 1-49.

10) Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 909-74.

11) Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of King Lear, edited by Russell Fraser, Signet Classics, 1963. Troyat, Henri, Tolstoy, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967, p. 605.

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