Few Shakespearean plays have caused the controversy that is found with King Lears ending scenes. Othello kills himself, Macbeth is executed, and of course in hamlet, everyone dies. Lear, however, is different from other Shakespearean classics. Is Lear mad or lucid? Is Cordelia really dead? Is Edmunds delay explainable? What is the nature of the Lear world that occasioned all of this? How does Knights thesis relate to the ending?Critical commentary varies and appears exhaustive. Bradley speaks of evil, but thinks Lear dies in a moment of supreme joy; Knight argues that however vicious and cruel the Lear world is, the death of Cordelia represents the future triumph of love. Frye writes of Lears madness as our sanity if it were not sedated as if the universe is fundamentally absurd. Andrews writes that the meaning depends on the F vs. Q variations, and that the audience must be left uncertain. Snyder says that Lear dramatizes the phases of dying that we all endure, and that Lear dies because he is warn out by the exhaustion of life. Rackin comments that the play moves through a dialectical process of reconciliation of opposites that culminate in Lears triumph of faith. Hennedy notes the existential approach saying that Lear dies secure in knowledge that Cordelia lives after death, having experienced transcendence. The paradox of (in a Christian sense) that hopes comes from the cross. Donner writes that the cathartic experience the end of the play affords us is the belief that justice had not been done; how could it, and we can not forget the tremendous potential man has for evil that no one but God could forgive. Harris argues that the promised end is dramatized by the ending of Lear, and the final words of the play make the meaning clearthe power of art transcends what language can only try to express. Foakes thinks that Hamlet now is less suited for the twentieth century than Lear, insofar as Lears existential content ...
