https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=65 How can one write after Shakespeare’s seminal yet terminal play? Howard Barker solves the problem by writing, after Shakespeare, a prelude to King Lear. Barker’s Seven Lears ends where Shakespeare’s King Lear begins and reads less like a rewriting than like a chronological, genealogical, archeological investigation about Shakespeare’s already catastrophic play. Barker here suggests hermeneutical elements to help us understand King Lear but simultaneously deprives them from any justifying impact. Seven Lears proposes to go back to the sources of King Lear but refuses to elucidate the mysteries of the play: Seven Lears seems an impossible attempt to come to terms with logic in a universe obtrusively described as arbitrary. Furthermore, Barker speaks of “literary necrophilia” when it comes to revisiting classical texts, situating his intertextual enterprise on the side of abjection or evil: the Barkerian paradox lies in the author’s proclivity to repudiate morals while making use of its codes. Barker, like Gloucester in the play, becomes the lover and not only a mere borrower of the texts he digs up from his macabre pantheon. Thematized, necrophilia is thus turned into one of the prevailing modes of Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe whose perverse seduction seeks to create, beyond logic and morals, a theatricality in which anxiety is the condition of beauty. Shakespeare en devenir N°1 — 2007 I. Réécritures théâtrales fr mer., 27 janv. 2010 17:58:20 +0100 ven., 13 déc. 2024 23:28:53 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=65 0