The art of avoidance: Avoidance as a means of (re)creation in a prequel adaptation to Shakespeare’s King Lear

This article attempts to give a reading of a play by Elaine Feinstein and the Women’s Theatre Group, Lear’s Daughters through/with Stanley Cavell’s essay ‘The avoidance of love’. It examines how avoidance and causality re- and de-form, recreate King Lear in Lear’s Daughters. Cavell’s essay serves as a guideline, an ‘inter-text’ or a bridge between the two plays in question, providing all the key notions and thoughts by which the prequel’s creative art of avoidance can be examined, as here avoidance will be possible to comprehend as a means of creation, or a writing technique.