“Why Brand They Us?”: The Metaphors and Metamorphoses of Stigma in <i>King Lear</i>

This article identifies stigma as the organizing concept behind several of the major metaphors in Shakespeare’s King Lear: old age, madness, bastardy, and blindness. Historicized readings of these stigmatized identities are brought into conversation with sociologist Erving Goffman’s ideas about the attention-grabbing aspect of stigma, generating an explanation of how stigma came to dominate the drama of King Lear even absent any deliberate authorial intent. By exploring the stigma experience in depth, King Lear is a compelling counterexample to the erasure of stigmatized people that more frequently happens, as theorized in David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor.”