SOURCE: “Morality and Literature—The Necessary Conflict,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 149-55.

In the following essay, Hyman explores the tension between morality and aesthetics in literature, using King Lear as his focus.

When Plato banished the poets and storytellers from his ideal society because their works make us ‘careless of justice and virtue’,¹ he challenged those who love literature to prove that literature was not immoral. Critics have since taken up this challenge, not only in the famous theoretical defences and apologies for poetry but, more successfully perhaps, in the work of interpretation. For critics have been able to find, in almost every important literary work, moral truths that society approves of, or, in the opinion of the critic, ought to approve of. But while most critics have been finding such truths, other critics have been questioning Plato's basic premise, arguing that...