Blooms Literary Themes - THE GROTESQUE.pdf - ymerleksi - home

King Lear(William Shakespeare),.“King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque”by G. Wilson Knight,in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear:A Collection of Critical Essays, (1978)Introduction“The comic and the tragic,” according to G. Wilson Knight,“rest both on the idea of incompatibilities, and are also,themselves, mutually exclusive: therefore to mingle them is toadd to the meaning of each; for the result is then but a newsublime incongruity.” Informed by this conception of the comicand the tragic, Knight discusses the comic aspects of KingLear, noting, along with the Fool, “humorous potentialities inthe most heart-wrenching of incidents.” Such a reading, forKnight, allows us to appreciate the importance of absurdity inour perception of the tragic. Knight claims that the grotesqueincidents in King Lear incite a profoundly conflicted responsein readers, one in which we are pulled between the sublimeKnight, G. Wilson “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque.” TwentiethCentury Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. JanetAdelman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978. p. 34–49. First publishedas a chapter of Knight’s book (The Wheel of Fire. London: Methuen & Co., 1949.p.160–76).115