the genre of play
http://www.hamlethaven.com/genre.html
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Why does Cordelia die? She’s innocent, after all. She’s courageous. She’s forgiving. And she lives happily ever after in each of the sources Shakespeare consulted as he wrote his play; only in Lear does she perish. What was the Bard thinking? Even Johnson, one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant editors, was baffled. “A play,” he wrote, “in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life. But since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play worse, or that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.” Well, yes. Except that pleasing an audience isn’t always the foremost consideration. Sometimes there are more crucial tasks.
Cordelia dies because Shakespeare, at his best, abandons poetic justice and confronts the chaotic flux of life. Every death that makes us weep—from Jesus Christ to Anne Frank, from Joan of Arc to Emmett Till—lies behind the death of Cordelia. That the innocent and the virtuous miscarry is not only true but commonplace; yet Lear still troubles its readers, tending as it does to unsettle comforting suppositions about human existence. It doesn’t negate them absolutely, but it casts them into doubt. And one of the duties of a teacher is to give such doubt a hearing.
http://wsm.wsu.edu/stories/2007/February/doubt.html
http://highweir.wordpress.com/2006/0...-cordelia-die/
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