"Nothing like the image and horror of it"

King Lear and Heart of Darkness

Authors

Richard Meek University of Hull

Abstract

Cluster: Shakespeare's Literary Afterlives

Edited by Mark Bayer

There are several allusions to King Lear at the end of Heart of Darkness, suggesting that Joseph Conrad might have had Shakespeare in mind during the composition of his novella. Both texts are concerned with the difficulty of producing meaning in the face of unspeakable horrors, and the problems involved in constructing an intelligible or meaningful "report." Heart of Darkness thus emerges as a sophisticated and skeptical "reading" of Shakespeare's tragedy: both texts reveal narrative to be a kind of confidence trick, while at the same time demonstrating the power of narrative and our need for coherent ends.

Author Biography

Richard Meek, University of Hull

Richard Meek is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Hull. He has published articles in SEL, English, Literature Compass, and FMLS, and his monograph, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, was published by Ashgate Press in 2009. He has co-edited a collection of essays exploring the notion of a "literary" Shakespeare, entitled Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing, and Reception (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is also interested in representations of sympathy and empathy in early modern literature, and his current research project is a monograph on this topic, provisionally entitled The Relativity of Sorrows.