SOURCE: Felperin, Howard. “Plays within Plays: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra.” In Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 68-117. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.
In the following excerpt, Felperin suggests that Shakespeare's King Lear defies both simple moral and absurdist readings—the two principal modes of mid-twentieth century critical interpretation of the drama.
