Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, Goldfarb explores the significance of the family struggles in Goldman's play.

Towards the end of the first act of Lion in Winter, John, the youngest prince, is astonished and horrified when his older brother Richard pulls a knife on him. "A knife," he says, "he's got a knife." To which his mother, Eleanor, responds by saying: "Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It is eleven eighty-three and we're barbarians."

This is a joke, of course; it is in fact the sort of easy laugh line that some commentators have complained about in Goldman's play, but there are some interesting things going on in this passage nevertheless. The laugh itself derives from a sort of distancing...