SOURCE: Frye, Dean. “The Context of Lear's Unbuttoning.” ELH 32, no. 1 (March 1965): 17-31.

In the following essay, Frye examines the images of clothing in King Lear, noting the importance of clothing as an element of disguise in Shakespearean drama.

Everyone feels that the moment when Lear begins to tear off his clothes on seeing Poor Tom is one of almost unlimited significance. The gesture is related to images of clothing that run throughout the play, so here action and poetry meet and reinforce one another. And they convey both emotion and idea in a way which makes the two inseparable. Here is one of the moments at which it is most clear, as clear as that Shakespeare is not a “dramatist of ideas,” that he is a dramatist of attitudes. In perfectly realistic fashion, passions in Shakespeare are regularly related, as cause or effect, to what Arthur Sewell calls...