Wuthering Heights and King Lear: Revisited

Abstract

Apart from religious literature, King Lear is the only text referenced explicitly within Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. This article will expand existing scholarship within this field in order to argue that, by alluding to King Lear within her novel, Brontë invites us to draw implicit comparisons between the two texts. I will therefore analyse their comparable structures, their shared handling of violence and revenge, their depictions of the natural world and their exploration of the concept of nothing, to demonstrate how Brontë frames her novel against the backdrop of Shakespearean tragedy.

keywords:

• Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• King Lear
• Shakespeare
• tragedy
• Wuthering   Heights

Notes

1 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Collector’s Library, 2003); hereafter WH.

2 Paul Edmondson, ‘Shakespeare and the Brontës’, Brontë Studies, 29.3 (2004), 185–98 (p. 194).

3 Lew Girdler, ‘Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 19.4 (1956), 385–92.

4 A.J. Tough, ‘Wuthering Heights and King Lear’, English, 11.109 (1972), 1–5.

5 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

6 Anon., ‘The Theatrical Examiner: Haymarket Theatre’, The Examiner, 27 October 1849, p. 678.

7 Anon., ‘Wuthering Heights: A Novel’, The Examiner, 8 January 1848, p. 21.

8 Anon., ‘The Literary Examiner’, The Examiner, 16 January 1858, p. 36.

9 Gail Marshall, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy’, Victorian Poetry, 44.4 (2006) 467–86 (p. 468).

10 ‘Theatre Bradford’, The Bradford Observer, 29 August 1844, p. 1.

11 Anon., ‘Home & District Intelligence’, The Bradford and Wakefield Observer; and Halifax, Huddersfield, and Keighley Reporter, 5 November 1846, p. 5.

12 Charles Cowden Clarke, Shakespeare’s Characters: Chiefly Those Subordinate (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1863), p. 167.

13 Arnold Krupat, ‘The Strangeness of Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25.3 (1970), 269–80 (p. 269).

14 Tough, p. 5.

15 William Shakespeare, King Lear (Walton-on-Thames: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), V. 3, ll. 322–25; hereafter Lear.

16 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 82.

17 Peter Halter, ‘The Endings of King Lear’, SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 5 (1990), 85–98 (p. 87).

18 Gilbert and Gubar, p. 259.

19 WH, pp. 65, 104, 152 and 204.

20 Lear, III. 6, ll. 17 and 48, and IV. 6, l. 183.

21 William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 115.

22 Gilbert and Gubar, p. 254.

23 Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 340.

24 Annette and Graham Harman, ‘Wuthering Heights and King Lear: The Natural, the Unnatural and the Supernatural’, Australian Brontë Association, http://www.ausbronte.net/docs/thund12.pdf [accessed 6 July 2019].

25 Grace Ioppolo, A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s King Lear (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 106.

26 Edmondson, p. 186.

27 ‘Contemporary Reviews of “Wuthering Heights”’, The Reader’s Guide to Wuthering Heights, https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/wh/reviews.php [accessed 15 March 2019].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edwin John Moorhouse Marr

Edwin John Moorhouse Marr is a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, where he is currently researching the production of railway space within nineteenth-century literature. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on Anne Brontë, and his MA on ‘Grief and Death in the Poems of Branwell Brontë’.