Lear’s Afterlife

Summary

It is true that, with respect to the disaster, one dies too late.

(Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster)

What does it mean to speak of the afterlife of a literary text? And why do some texts retain an enduring significance while others simply fade away? The survival of one text over another clearly depends on its sustained ability to unsettle existing conventions and to defamiliarize habitual perceptions, and in the case of canonical texts, such as Shakespeare, this is clearly a transformative potential which is retained over a considerable period of time. In this respect, of course, the afterlife of any given text is directly dependent on its critical life, its ability to draw generations of readers back to crucial points of analysis or interpretative ambiguity. In tracking back across Shakespeare's critical heritage and dipping into the closely contested editorial squabbles of years gone by, one unearths a series of textual disputes and dilemmas which open out into questions which remain unanswered to this day. In confronting the unlikely resurrection of Hermione at the end of The Winter's Tale, or the confusion surrounding the whereabouts of Lady Macbeth's 'missing children', the critic encounters a form of inexplicable alterity or otherness which exceeds his or her intellectual grasp, rather than providing the grounded repleteness of a 'meaningful' solution.