ABSTRACT
One imagines that audience response to William Shakespeare’s plays is a static phenomenon. Reactions to directing and staging notwithstanding, we assume the content more or less affects us as it did previous generations. Perhaps there is something in the structure itself of Shakespeare’s other dramas that somehow relieved the audience in a way that King Lear does not. Shakespeare’s King Lear became increasingly popular after World War I, and even more so after World War II. Shakespeare often used Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, first published in 1577, as a source for his history plays. Children are sources of narcissistic gratification, and reminders of the historic self. Therefore children are important as both an extension of oneself into the future and also as witnesses to one’s past. When the parents surrender some aspects of their power to their children, the children no longer can hold their forbidden hostile or sexual feelings in check.
