ABSTRACT

In Looking for Richard, Al Pacino offers the above rationale for making his film, and it comes as a response to a goal. This chapter participates as much in the production of Shakespeare's plays and their meanings as the culture in which they were first produced. While it does not search for Goneril and Regan by examining performance options as Pacino does, it animates open-ended conversations about them, a process of looking that will be part quest and part intellectual re-evaluation. When Goneril and Regan respond to their roles as leaders of the state in a traditionally masculine manner, rather than by behaving as women and caring for their father first and the nation second, we, as readers, reject their violence as unnatural. Rather than assuming that Goneril and Regan disrupt the patriarchal order, the chapter argues that their rule exposes the violence of patrilineal structures of power.