Thursday, June 9, 2022, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Bradd Shore, Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology Emeritus

Just Nothing: How King Lear Means

Last year saw the publication of Bradd Shore’s latest book, Shakespeare and Social Theory: The Play of Great Ideas. Today, he’ll be sharing its insights about King Lear, focusing on Shakespeare’s craftsmanship, examining the relationship between the play’s language and its harrowing effect on its audience (and even its readers). Of course, King Lear brings together themes that are themselves harrowing: the tragedy of growing old, an aged father’s vanity and folly, a king’s confounding of affairs of state and those of the heart, filial ingratitude and greed, and more. These themes suggest what King Lear means. But how King Lear means is something different. Using insights from contemporary metaphor theory, Dr. Shore will discuss Shakespeare’s use of buried and intersecting metaphors that rhetorically perform Lear’s “undoing” on its characters as well as its audience, as King Lear enacts for us and within us the unraveling of the world.