SOURCE: Levin, Richard. “King Lear Defamiliarized.” In “Lear” from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten, pp. 146-71. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997.

In the following essay, Levin summarizes critical approaches to King Lear from 1960 to 1984, citing Marxist, feminist, and new historicist—as opposed to formalist—interpretations of the play.

We exist, it turns out, within a single broad universe of discourse and we now have some assurance that the [King Lear] each of us sees is, in some important particulars, the same play.

—Lawrence Danson (1981) 3

Greenblatt's King Lear is, in many ways, perfectly recognizable: good and evil are not in question; … nor is there any question of the human desires that the play engages.

—Jonathan Goldberg (1987) 243

Someone who has not kept up with current critical trends may have to be told that the statement in my second epigraph is...