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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 1 )

There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope. There is no scene which does not contribute to the aggravation of the distress or conduct of the action, and scarce a line which does not conduce to the progress of the scene. So powerful is the current of the poet’s imagination, that the mind, which once ventures within it, is hurried irresistibly along.

—Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare

For its unsurpassed combination of sheer terrifying force and its existential and cosmic reach, King Lear leads this ranking as drama’s supreme achievement. The notion that King Lear is Shakespeare’s (and by implication drama’s) greatest play is certainly debatable, but consensus in its favor has gradually coalesced over the centuries since its first performance around 1606. During and immediately following William Shakespeare’s lifetime, there is no evidence that King Lear was particularly valued over other of the playwright’s dramas. It was later considered a play in need of an improving makeover. In 1681 poet and dramatist Nahum Tate, calling King Lear “a Heap of Jewels unstrung and unpolish’d,” altered what many Restoration critics and audiences found unbecoming and unbearable in the drama. Tate eliminated the Fool, whose presence was considered too vulgar for a proper tragedy, and gave the play a happy ending, restoring Lear to his throne and arranging the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar, neatly tying together with poetic justice the double strands of Shakespeare’s far bleaker drama. Tate’s bowdlerization of King Lear continued to be presented throughout the 18th century, and the original play was not performed again until 1826. By then the Romantics had reclaimed Shakespeare’s version, and an appreciation of the majesty and profundity of King Lear as Shakespeare’s greatest achievement had begun. Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared the play “the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet”; while Percy Bysshe Shelley considered it “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” John Keats, who described the play as “the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay,” offered King Lear as the best example of the intensity, with its “close relationship with Beauty & Truth,” that is the “Excellence of every Art.” Dissenting voices, however, challenged the supremacy of King Lear . Essayist Charles Lamb judged the play to have “nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting” and deemed it “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.” The great Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley acknowledged King Lear as “Shakespeare’s greatest achievement” but “not his best play.” For Bradley, King Lear , with its immense scope and the variety and intensity of its scenes, is simply “too huge for the stage.” Perhaps the most notorious dissenter against the greatness of King Lear was Leo Tolstoy, who found its fable-like unreality reprehensible and ruled it a “very bad, carelessly composed production” that “cannot evoke amongst us anything but aversion and weariness.” Such qualifications and dismissals began to diminish in light of 20thcentury history. The existential vision of King Lear has seemed even more pertinent and telling as a reflection of the human condition; while modern dramatic artistry with its contrapuntal structure and anti-realistic elements has caught up with Shakespeare’s play. Today King Lear is commonly judged unsurpassed in its dramatization of so many painful but inescapable human and cosmic truths.

King Lear is based on a well-known story from ancient Celtic and British mythology, first given literary form by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1137). Raphael Holinshed later repeated the story of Lear and his daughters in his Chronicles (1587), and Edmund Spenser, the first to name the youngest daughter, presents the story in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1589). A dramatic version— The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonerill, Ragan, and Cordella —appeared around 1594. All these versions record Lear dividing his kingdom, disinheriting his youngest daughter, and being driven out by his two eldest daughters before reuniting with his youngest, who helps restore him to the throne and bring her wicked sisters to justice. Shakespeare is the first to give the story an unhappy ending, to turn it from a sentimental, essentially comic tale in which the good are eventually rewarded and the evil punished into a cosmic tragedy. Other plot elements—Lear’s madness, Cordelia’s hanging, Lear’s death from a broken heart, as well as Kent’s devotion and the role of the Fool—are also Shakespeare’s inventions, as is the addition of the parallel plot of Gloucester and his sons, which Shakespeare adapted from a tale in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia . The play’s double plot in which the central situation of Lear’s suffering and self-knowledge is paralleled and counterpointed in Gloucester’s circumstances makes King Lear different from all the other great tragedies. The effect widens and deepens the play into a universal tragedy of symphonic proportions.

King Lear opens with the tragic turning point in its very first scene. Compared to the long delays in Hamle t and Othello for the decisive tragic blow to fall, King Lear , like Macbeth , shifts its emphasis from cause to consequence. The play foregoes nearly all exposition or character development and immediately presents a show trial with devastating consequences. The aging Lear has decided to divest himself of kingly responsibilities by dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. Although the maps of the divisions are already drawn, Lear stages a contest for his daughters to claim their portion by a public profession of their love. “Tell me, my daughters,” Lear commands, “. . . Which of you shall we say doth love us most.” Lear’s self-indulgence—bargaining power for love—is both a disruption of the political and natural order and an essential human violation in his demanding an accounting of love that defies the means of measuring it. Goneril and Regan, however, vie to outdo the other in fulsome pledges of their love, while Cordelia, the favorite, responds to Lear’s question “what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters” with the devastatingly honest truth: “Nothing,” a word that will reverberate through the entire play. Cordelia forcefully and simply explains that she loves Lear “According to my bond, no more nor less.” Lear is too blind and too needy to appreciate her fidelity or yet understand the nature of love, or the ingenuous flattery of his older daughters. He responds to the hurt he feels by exiling the one who loves him most authentically and deeply. The rest of the play will school Lear in his mistake, teaching him the lesson of humanity that he violates in the play’s opening scene.

The devastating consequences of his decision follow. Lear learns that he cannot give away power and still command allegiance from Goneril or Regan. Their avowals of love quickly turn into disrespect for a now useless and demanding parent. From the opening scene in which Lear appears in all his regal splendor, he will be successively stripped of all that invests a king in majesty and insulates a human being from first-hand knowledge of suffering and core existential truths. Urged to give up 50 of his attending knights by Goneril, Lear claims more gratitude from Regan, who joins her sister in further whittling down Lear’s retinue from 100 knights to 50, to 25, 10, 5, to none, ironically in the language of calculation of the first scene. Lear explodes:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s .

Lear is now readied to face reality as a “poorest thing.” Lear’s betrayal by his daughters is paralleled by the treachery of the earl of Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund, who plots to supplant the legitimate son, Edgar, and eventually claim supremacy over his father. Edmund, one of the most calculating and coldblooded of Shakespeare’s villains, rejects all the bonds of family and morality early on in the play by affirming: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law / My services are bound.” Refusing to accept the values of a society that rejects him as a bastard, Edmund will operate only by the laws of survival of the fittest in a relentless drive for dominance. He convinces Edgar that Gloucester means to kill him, forcing his brother into exile, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam, a mad beggar. In the play’s overwhelming third act—perhaps the most overpowering in all of drama—Edgar encounters Lear, his Fool, and his lone retainer, the disguised Kent, whom Lear had banished in the first scene for challenging Lear’s treatment of Cordelia. The scene is a deserted heath with a fierce storm raging, as Lear, maddened by the treatment of his daughters, rails at his fate in apocalyptic fury:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts, S inge my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder, Strike fl at the thick rotundity o’ th’ world, Crack nature’s mould, all germens spill at once, That makes ingrateful man.

The storm is a brilliant expressionistic projection of Lear’s inner fury, with his language universalizing his private experience in a combat with elemental forces. Beseeching divine justice, Lear is bereft and inconsolable, declaring “My wits begin to turn.” His descent into madness is completed when he meets the disguised Edgar who serves as Lear’s mirror and emblem of humanity as “unaccommodated man”—a “poor, bare, forked animal”:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

Lear’s suffering has led him to compassion and an understanding of the human needs he had formerly ignored. It is one of the rare moments of regenerative hope before the play plunges into further chaos and violence.

Act 3 concludes with what has been called the most horrifying scene in dramatic literature. Gloucester is condemned as a traitor for colluding with Cordelia and the French invasion force. Cornwall, Regan’s husband, orders Gloucester bound and rips out one of his eyes. Urged on by Regan (“One side will mock another; th’ other too”), Cornwall completes Gloucester’s blinding after a protesting servant stabs Cornwall and is slain by Regan. In agony, Gloucester calls out for Edmund as Regan supplies the crushing truth:

Out, treacherous villain! Thou call’st on him that hates thee. It was he That made the overture of thy treasons to us, Who is too good to pity thee.

Oedipus-like, Gloucester, though blind, now sees the truth of Edmund’s villainy and Edgar’s innocence. Thrown out of the castle, he is ordered to “smell / His way to Dover.”

Act 4 arranges reunions and the expectation that the suffering of both Lear and Gloucester will be compensated and villainy purged. Edgar, still posing as Poor Tom, meets his father and agrees to guide him to Dover where the despairing Gloucester intends to kill himself by jumping from its cliffs. On arriving, Edgar convinces his father that he has fallen and survived, and Gloucester accepts his preservation as an act of the gods and vows “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die.” The act concludes with Lear’s being reunited with Cordelia. Awaking in her tent, convinced that he has died, Lear gradually recognizes his daughter and begs her forgiveness as a “very foolish, fond old man.”

The stage is now set in act 5 for a restoration of order and Lear, having achieved the requisite self-knowledge through suffering, but Shakespeare pushes the play beyond the reach of consolation. Although Edmund is bested in combat by his brother, and Regan is poisoned by Goneril before she kills herself, neither poetic nor divine justice prevails. Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner, but their rescue comes too late. As Shakespeare’s stage directions state, “Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms,” and the play concludes with one of the most heart-wrenching scenes and the most overpowering lines in all of drama. Lear, although desperate to believe that his beloved daughter is alive, gradually accepts the awful truth:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all. Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!

Lear dies with this realization of cosmic injustice and indifference, while holding onto the illusion that Cordelia might still survive (“Look on her, look, her lips / Look there, look there!”). The play ends not with the restoration of divine, political, or familial order but in a final nihilistic vision. Shakespeare pushes the usual tragic progression of action leading to suffering and then to self-knowledge to a view into the abyss of life’s purposelessness and cruelty. The best Shakespeare manages to affirm in the face of intractable human evil and cosmic indifference is the heroism of endurance. Urging his despairing father on, Edgar states in the play’s opposition to despair:

. . . Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. Come on.

Ultimately, King Lear , more than any other drama, in my view, allows its audience to test the limits of endurance in the face of mortality and meaninglessness. It has been said that only the greatest art sustains without consoling. There is no better example of this than King Lear .

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I like to think that even the Greeks would’ve weeped at this incredible play. And perhaps even that man from Uz, whose grief was heavier that the sand of the sea, would’ve pitied Lear. Great analysis. Thank you!

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A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

K ing Lear is one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies; indeed, some critics have considered it the greatest. It is certainly one of the bleakest. The plot and subplot deftly weave together the principal themes of the play, which include reason, madness, blindness of various kinds, and – perhaps most crucially of all – the relationship between a father and his children. Before we offer some words of analysis of King Lear , it might be worth recapping the plot of the play.

King Lear : plot summary

King Lear has a plot and subplot which neatly and closely complement each other. The main plot centres on the ageing King Lear, who begins the play by dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters, only to disinherit one of them, Cordelia, when she refuses to tell him that she loves him.

The subplot also focuses on a father, the Duke of Gloucester, who has two sons: Edgar, his legitimate heir; and Edmund, his illegitimate son whom he fathered during a moment of youthful lust.

When Lear gathers his three daughters together to divide up his realm among them, he gives Regan (who is cold and calculating) and Goneril (who is hot-headed and impetuous) the biggest share, because they both play along with his game when he asks his daughters to say which of them loves him most.

But Cordelia, the third daughter (who is staid and dignified) refuses to play this game and says she merely loves him as much as is expected of a daughter for her father, and as a result of her refusal, King Lear banishes her to France. When the Earl of Kent tries to reason with Lear, he, too, is banished – but he returns, in disguise, so he can remain close to his King and serve him.

Meanwhile, in the subplot, Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, sets about getting his half-brother Edgar out of the way by telling their father that Edgar plans to murder him. In an echo of the main plot, Gloucester banishes his (true and loyal) son, Edgar, who will turn up shortly after this, in disguise, as a beggar and madman going by the name of ‘Poor Tom’.

No sooner have they been given Lear’s kingdom than his remaining two daughters start turning against their aged father. They refuse to let his vast royal entourage into their home, and Lear – complete with his Fool (who is the one person who can speak the truth to the King without suffering punishment), and with Kent (in disguise) – walks out into a storm. Sheltering in a hut, the three of them meet ‘Poor Tom’ (Edgar in disguise).

Gloucester takes Lear into his home, and Lear curses his daughters for not loving him. Gloucester knows that Regan and Goneril plan to kill their father, so he sends Lear to Dover, on the coast, where Cordelia is landing with a French army. Edmund tells Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, what Gloucester has done, and they put out Gloucester’s eyes and cast him out.

Edgar (still disguised as the lunatic Poor Tom) meets his father, and madman leads blind man to Dover, where he dissuades Gloucester from suicide. They meet Lear, who has now gone completely mad and is wandering the heath.

As if this isn’t enough plot strands involving this rather large cast of central characters, there is also a love triangle between the two sisters, Regan and Goneril, and Edmund, whom they both love (even though they are both already married). Edgar intercepts a love letter Goneril has written to Edmund, and passes it to Goneril’s husband, Albany.

When Albany gets back from fighting Cordelia’s French force, he challenges Edmund to fight anyone who challenges him; Edgar ends up killing his half-brother. As Edmund dies, he reveals that he has arranged for Lear and Cordelia to be killed.

Everything now descends into mass death, but also enlightenment: Goneril poisons Regan over Edmund, and then kills herself. Lear finds Cordelia in prison, following her capture; she dies in his arms, and Lear, having wept for her, dies.

King Lear : analysis

King Lear is a bleak play, but like all great tragedies, a measure of catharsis or healing is achieved through Lear’s suffering, as well as that of the other characters. The play might be summed up as a battle between reason and madness, or between blindness and sight, except that the conflict between the two dissolves into a distinction without a difference.

Paradoxically, it is only when he has been (literally) blinded that Gloucester gains insight into his family, and realises that Edgar, not Edmund, was his true and trusted son. Similarly, it is only when King Lear has gone completely mad on the heath that he comes to realise that Cordelia, not Regan or Cordelia, loved him best; in comparison, his other two daughters were mere flatterers using him to get his kingdom (and then push him out of the way).

These paradoxes are also present in the relationship between King and Fool: Lear’s folly or (metaphorical) blindness is highlighted by his Fool, who is one of the wisest people in all of King Lear , and can (paradoxically, again) only be so frank with his King because, being a mere Fool, nobody is expected to take him seriously.

Part of the artistic triumph of the play is the way Shakespeare brings all of these apparent contradictions together to create a piece of compelling drama that is moving without being sentimental, despairing but also illuminating. Thematically, these various strands work together to reinforce the play’s central concern with madness and reason, blindness and seeing.

And Shakespeare cleverly sets up the characters as doubles, opposites, and complements: as Harold Bloom notes in a persuasive analysis of King Lear (in his book Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human ), in a play where so many of the major characters speak to each other at some point, it was canny of Shakespeare never to have Lear and Edmund speak a word to each other throughout the entire play, because they are complete antitheses: where Lear is all feeling, Edmund is ‘ice-cold’ and emotionless.

Less than a hundred years after Shakespeare wrote the play, in the 1680s, King Lear was given a rather dramatic (as it were) rewrite by the Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate. But in fact the story of King Lear was originally a happy one, when it first appeared in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century.

The anonymous play, King Leir , on which Shakespeare based his tragedy also ends on a somewhat more upbeat note. Shakespeare took the story and unleashed its apocalyptic tragedy, in which everyone dies except Edgar, who is to inherit the realm whose division, at the outset, led to the subsequent chaos that unfolded.

One reason Shakespeare may have been tempted to take King Leir and rewrite it for the Jacobean stage was that his King, James I of England (and James VI of Scotland), had been responsible for uniting England and Scotland under a common ruler; indeed, if we include Wales (which always gets left out), he brought together three kingdoms.

In this connection, Lear’s fatal decision to divide his kingdom into three parts at the beginning of King Lear takes on additional historical relevance. Was Shakespeare trying to flatter his King and show him How Not to Rule?

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8 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear”

I wish I had seen that production I heard about where the opening scene had everyone in party hats while (I think) Lear was whirled about furiously in a wheelchair (UK ten years ago??). Anyway, there’s so much potential for a creative director to set the stage with that scene!

I have seen three versions, maybe four, and it is always interesting to see how the actor portrays Lear: autocratic, megalomaniac, ruthless, unenlightened? Give David Tennant a few more years and let’s see him tackle it or maybe Peter Capaldi is ready?

More productions of Lear, please

Well written

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Thanks for this but…I’m fairly certain you’ve got mixed up with the names of the daughters once or twice. Cordelia appears a little strangely especially towards the end of your piece.

Well spotted, Ken – thanks to your eagle eye, I’ve updated the post but do let me know if there are any remaining inconsistencies (Cordelia was erroneously named in place of Goneril at one point, but this is now fixed).

My pleasure – not often I catch one on you! But with such a dense plot, it is no surprise. Lear, I find, needs a couple of stiff drinks to be ready to swallow, as it were…

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King Lear dramatizes the story of an aged king of ancient Britain, whose plan to divide his kingdom among his three daughters ends tragically. When he tests each by asking how much she loves him, the older daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter him. The youngest, Cordelia, does not, and Lear disowns and banishes her. She marries the king of France. Goneril and Regan turn on Lear, leaving him to wander madly in a furious storm.

Meanwhile, the Earl of Gloucester’s illegitimate son Edmund turns Gloucester against his legitimate son, Edgar. Gloucester, appalled at the daughters’ treatment of Lear, gets news that a French army is coming to help Lear. Edmund betrays Gloucester to Regan and her husband, Cornwall, who puts out Gloucester’s eyes and makes Edmund the Earl of Gloucester.

Cordelia and the French army save Lear, but the army is defeated. Edmund imprisons Cordelia and Lear. Edgar then mortally wounds Edmund in a trial by combat. Dying, Edmund confesses that he has ordered the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. Before they can be rescued, Lear brings in Cordelia’s body and then he himself dies.

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5 Sovereignty, Justice, and Political Power: King Lear

• Published: September 2020
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King Lear intertwines two family stories: one of disinheritance and the consequent crisis of sovereignty that follows on the division of territory and political authority; the other of legitimacy, illegitimacy, resentment, and revenge against a father. The political plot of King Lear puts sovereign authority, patriarchal authority, political strategy, and violence into juxtaposition with the claims of social justice. The play puts into question the idea of a ‘sovereign body’, in particular in its treatment of economic and social transformations in attitudes to value and exchange, and in its meditation on the way sovereign power destroys human and social bodies. These themes can be reflected in interpretations of the drama that emphasize loneliness and meaninglessness. The drama also focuses on forms of violence which track social status, and instantiate forms of authority, including sovereignty.

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William Shakespeare

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Fathers, Children, and Siblings

The personal drama of King Lear revolves around the destruction of family relationships. Tragedy emerges from bonds broken between parents and children—and, at a secondary level, from the loss of ties among siblings. Lear, misreading Cordelia's understated, but true, devotion to him renounces his "parental care" (1.1.127) of her. This rejection is twofold. Lear withdraws his "father's heart" (1.1.142); he also strips Cordelia of the financial and political support that formerly made her attractive to…

Authority and Order

At the beginning of the play, Lear is an authority figure, embodying order in his own person and commanding it from his family and followers. (This is how he is able to compel his elder two daughters to participate in the dramatic ceremony dividing the kingdom by professing their absolute love on cue, precisely when he demands it; this is why Gloucester, Kent, and others respectfully watch the ceremony unfold, despite thinking that Lear's plan…

Disintegration, Chaos, Nothingness

Although Lear begins as a figure of authority and order, when he gives up his power and Goneril and Regan turn against him, he falls apart, going mad. Moreover, his personal decline parallels a farther-reaching dissolution of order and justice in the British state. Lear's error, based on blindness and misjudgment, doesn't just ruin him personally. It leads to a political situation in which there is no order to guarantee justice, despite his (and Gloucester's)…

Originally, Lear wishes to free himself of the burdens of ruling his kingdom because he is aware of his old age and wishes to "crawl unburdened toward death" (1.1.42). As his choice of the verb "crawl" suggests, Lear has a sense that old age forces the individual to remember his or her animal aspect—that is, the fact that human beings, like animals, are subjected to the forces of physical nature and have physical needs.

Fooling and Madness

From early on in the play, the Fool is probably the character with the greatest insight into what the consequences of Lear's misjudgments of his daughters will be. (The Fool's only competition in this respect comes from Kent in 1.1; in 1.2 Gloucester seems only to have a vague intuition that Lear's decision was a mistake.) Calling Lear himself a Fool and admonishing him that he has reduced himself to "nothing" by dividing and handing…

Blindness and Insight

The tragic errors that King Lear and Gloucester make in misjudging their children constitute a form of figurative blindness—a lack of insight into the true characters of those around them. Reminding the audience of this fact, the language of the play resounds with references to eyes and seeing from the very beginning. Cornwall and Regan make these images and metaphors of (failed) vision brutally literal when they blind Gloucester in 3.7. For the remainder of…

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by William Shakespeare

King lear essay questions.

Who is the protagonist of King Lear ? How do you know?

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, the distinction between protagonists, antagonists, and neutral characters is often blurred in King Lear . In many ways, Lear himself can be considered an antagonist, as he catalyzes the dissolution of his own kingdom when he disinherits Cordelia. But Lear is also a type of protagonist, as his daughters Goneril and Regan in turn strip him of his power and make Lear a more sympathetic character. In this way, there is no clear protagonist in the play, and audiences are forced to reckon with the question of who, ultimately, is to blame for Lear's demise.

What role does age play in the development of the narrative?

Age is an important motif in King Lear , most notably because Lear is an older king who is attempting to safeguard his kingdom by leaving it in the hands of his three daughters. However, Lear's age is something that he does not necessarily take seriously until it is too late: he remains convinced that he is still an effective and powerful ruler even after disinheriting Cordelia, a sense of denial that makes him vulnerable to the greed of Goneril and Regan. Ironically, only after Lear has descended into a near-mad state and only after his demise is all but guaranteed does he come to recognize himself as a feeble and weak old man.

What significance does Lear's fool have in the play?

The fool in King Lear is, ironically, likely the wisest and most knowledgable character in the play. He is frequently warning Lear about the consequences of his decisions, and often speaks harsh truths masked as entertaining half-riddles so as not to overstep his social role. Furthermore, the fool serves as a type of foil for Lear himself, as Lear more often ignores or ridicules his fool instead of taking his cautions seriously, thereby highlighting Lear's own lack of self-knowledge and foresight.

How might you explain Cordelia's response to Lear's test of love at the beginning of the play?

Unlike Goneril and Regan, Cordelia refuses to appeal to Lear's vanity when expressing her love for him, even if it means losing her inheritance. Goneril and Regan both deliver hyperbolic but disingenuous speeches about their love for their father, and when Lear asks Coredlia to do the same, she remains silent. Cordelia's response is puzzling, but ultimately emphasizes her ability to distinguish between unconditional love and false love expressed for the sake of benefiting from it. Cordelia's silence is a testament to her love for her father over her desire for property, as she likely knows what the consequences of her actions will be.

Why does Cornwall blind Gloucester?

Though King Lear is not Shakespeare's bloodiest play (that title belongs to Titus Andronicus ), the blinding of Gloucester is one of the cruelest and most violent scenes the bard ever wrote. Technically, Cornwall blinds Gloucester because Gloucester may have committed treason by sending Lear to Cordelia (who, after her exile, is now considered a foreign invader). However, Cornwall's behavior is more intimately attached to his anger and penchant for violence than his commitment to justice. The act is a testament to the play's interest in portraying the world as a relentlessly cruel and endlessly bleak place.

King Lear Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for King Lear is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

"Themes of King Lear are skilfully presented through imagery and symbolism"

King Lear is rife with animal imagery, as the play is known for interrogating whether mankind is anything "more" than animal after all. Most often, animal imagery appears in the form of savage or carnivorous beasts, usually associated with Goneril...

A tragic hero moves the reader to pity,since his misfortune is greater than he deserves,and also creates fear,since his tragedy might easily befall one of us.To what extent does Lear fit the definition of a tragic hero?

Check this out:

http://bailieborocslibrary.weebly.com/blog/lear-develops-more-as-a-tragic-hero-than-gloucester-discuss

Edmund's "Up With Bastards" soliloquy in King Lear

The repetition makes Edmund sound harsh and angry.

Study Guide for King Lear

King Lear study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Essays for King Lear

King Lear literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of King Lear.

• The Heroines of Crime and Punishment, King Lear, and To the Lighthouse
• Folly of the Fool
• Sight and Consciousness: An Interpretive Study in King Lear
• An Examination of the Inverse Tropes of Sight and Blindness in King Lear
• Gender, Power, and Economics in King Lear

Lesson Plan for King Lear

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Theme of Power in Shakespeare Play ”King Lear” Analysis

In the play “King Lear” written by Shakespeare, several themes are observable and easy to understand: love, ambition, power, betrayal, foolishness. One of the ideas that is important to understand and easy to grasp while reading the play is ‘’loyalty’’. In ‘’King Lear’’ loyalty is contrasted through the relationship Lear has with his three daughters especially the drive for power of Goneril and Regan, while Cordelia is a definition of the theme itself in that she demonstrates honesty and allegiance, to her father.

This essay will explain the importance of loyalty and its contrasts throughout the acts of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The two oldest daughters of the King, Goneril and Regan are interesting when discussing the theme of loyalty in Shakespeare’s tragedy. They contrast this theme by lying to their father when they are asked how much they love him. Their ambition for power being greater than their sense of morality, they utter an expected speech to their father in order to get the most part of the land that he is giving away by reason of his old age.

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Goneril starts by making up elegant words to her father: ‘’ Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter, Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, Beyond what can be valued rich or rare, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour, as much as child e’er loved or father found; A love that makes breath poor and speech unable beyond all manner of ‘so much’ I love you. ’’ (I. i. 55) Impressed and blinded by the words spoken by his two daughters, the king decides then and there to give his kingdom to the both of them. This is a decision that he regrets shortly after.

Later in the play, the two daughters betray their father by taking away his power, forcing him to give up on his knights, and making him go mad; therefore, Lear becomes virtually homeless. Goneril, being the first one who has a visit from the king, she tells the king that he cannot have as many knights as he because of the knights’ unpredictable behavior. Frustrated, the king decides to leave Goneril’s kingdom and to visit Regan who, in order to run away from her father, decides to spend a night to Gloucester’s castle. Regan, the youngest of the two evil children, is not any better than Goneril.

The hypocritical daughter waits for her sister to confront her father about the number of knights he is allowed to have in Regan’s castle, and then she locks him outside of the castle. Lear before leaving responds: ‘’O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs – Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need – you heaves, give me that patience, patience I need!

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man as ful of grief as age, wretched in both; If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, and let not women’s weapons, water drops, stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall – I will do such things – What they are yet I Know not; But they shall be the terrors of earth. You think I’ll weep. No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping; (storm and tempest)’’(II. 258-278)

At this point the king is homeless and his insanity becomes more evident as the tempest gets serious. At the end of the play, after many foolish and cruel actions of the two sisters they finally turn against one another and Goneril tries to poison Regan to secure the love of Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester. Not caring about everything that happens to their father, Goneril and Regan show their true face and they continue to focus on their ambition for power. Cordelia at this moment is demonstrating the real meaning of loyalty and trueness.

The only daughter who is showing loyalty in the first act is Cordelia, the youngest daughter of King Lear, and the favorite one. She, when asked how much she loves her father, in order to get a part of the lands he is giving away to his daughters and wants to determine who loves him the most, speaks the truth and answers: ‘’Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth, I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less. ’’ (I. i. 92) Knowing that her father will not be happy about this answer, she decides to remain loyal and tell the truth to the king and to keep it that way, even after being disowned by Lear.

Unable to speak her love to her father, Cordelia is banished from the kingdom by the King then she leaves with the King of France, who is impressed by Cordelia’s honesty. Cordelia’s appearance in the play is very brief but crucial; after being banished from the kingdom she only returns in the act four where she shows how loyal she is to her father. After Lear’s rejection from his two other girls kingdom’s he goes mad. Cordelia decides to find him in the tempest to save his, life knowing what will happen to him. She finally finds him and meets him with hesitation and fear, but Lear’s madness has caused him to lose his reason.

When she arrives Lear does not recognize her. Despite the king’s behavior, she manages to forgive him. Eventually Lear finally realizes that she is not a ghost but Cordelia, his youngest daughter. Lear begins to recognize her loyalty and honesty. They reconcile and Lear admits his errors and understands the meaning of loyalty. ‘’Be your tears wet? yes, ‘faith. I pray, weep not: If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: You have some cause, they have not. ’’(IV. 7 72-76) This is just before she is hanged by the decision of Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son.

At this moment Lear starts regain his grasp on sanity. Loyalty is the principal theme in “King Lear”. While being contrasted by the two evil daughters of the king Goneril and Regan who finally turns out one against the other, Cordelia is, by her behavior an evidence of the true love of a daughter and of the loyalty owed in a family. A lot of other aspects subthemes are noticeable when regarding the subplot. The message that Shakespeare was trying to present in “King Lear” has much to do with the bonds of the family and the real meaning of loyalty, this transcends the significance of kingdoms such as those formerly belonging to Lear.

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The tragedy of king lear and king lear: the importance of the brothers.

William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of King Lear is a dark tale of betrayal whose popularity is seen in its many productions and adaptations. The play itself not completely original, in fact, as the main plot and characters are Shakespeare’s versions of the British cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth’s recounting of the story in History of

The theme of madness in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello Analysis

            In the works of William Shakespeare there are many themes that are common amongst the bard’s plays. It seems that Shakespeare was fascinated with certain aspects of human nature, including love, marriage, friendship, and tragedy; however, one of the most interesting of these universal themes is that of madness. The theme of madness is

Compassion in Tragedy: Shakespeare’s Major Theme in King Lear

Albert Schweitzer once said that “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” Compassion is feeling sympathy, being kind, and caring for others. In William Shakespeare’s play King Lear, an important theme is that it’s important to show kindness to others, even in difficult times.

Madness in King Lear and Hamlet by William Shakespeare Analysis

The tragedies of Hamlet and King Lear display characters that are afflicted with madness. While for some of them, this madness is self-imposed, for others the mental challenges are real. During the Elizabethan era—the time in which William Shakespeare wrote these plays—more than one idea circulated about the significance of madness. On the one hand, madness

How does Shakespeare present Edmund in King Lear? Analysis

King Lear is a play about child – parent relationships, nature, Christianity and enlightenment. King Lear initiates with a King dividing up his land and bestowing it upon his three daughters. After being betrayed by his youngest born Cordelia, Lear banishes her and starts his struggle with madness. King Lear is a tragic play and

Consider the role of the Fool in King Lear. How important is he to the play as a whole?

King Arthur

The Fool is considered an important character in the play even though he is not a major participant in events witnessed. His comments, full of ironic insight, provide wisdom and reasoning for Lear at times of need. He generally plays three major roles; Lear’s inner – conscience, represents Lear’s alter ego and plays a dramatic

Theme of blindness in King Lear

It is evident that several characters throughout the text King Lear written by William Shakespeare move from blindness to a clearer perception. It has been said that King Lear is about a tragedy of “man going sane. ” In Shakespearean terms, blind has a different meaning than modern English. Blindness is normally defined as the

Theme of False reality in King Lear

In Shakespearean terms, being blind means something entirely different than our common day view. Blindness can normally be defined as the inability of the eye to see, but according to Shakespeare, blindness is not a physical quality,but a mental flaw some people possess. In other words, its the ability to see life not from an

Love,Friendship, Loyalty in William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) explores the themes of love, friendship, and loyalty in his plays A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600) and King Lear (1603-1606), presenting them with inconsistencies that can be better understood by considering the historical context in which he wrote. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare's critical examination of these themes was significant for understanding the

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King Lear Essay - "abuse of power"

EF_Simone 2 / 1985   Sep 11, 2009   #2 "The main issue in King Lear, is the abuse of power. Everything else is subordinate to this theme." Who made that statement? Since you are basing your essay on it (or, rather, on the refutation of it), you need to at least acknowledge who said it. Also, you need to be more clear about your thesis in your introduction, stating clearly that you agree that abuse of power is an important theme in the play, but that you believe that other themes are of equivalent or greater importance. It's not enough, in the body of your essay, just to show that other themes exist. The statement you are refuting does not deny that other themes exist but, rather, states that all other themes are subordinate to the theme of the abuse of power. So, if you think that reconciliation or blindness are of equivalent or greater importance than the theme of abuse of power, you need to cite some evidence to support that belief.

OP Summer103 1 / 2   Sep 11, 2009   #3 Thanks Simone. The statement was given to me by a teacher of mine so I do not need to state who said it, it is merely the topic of the whole essay. I want to make the themes of reconciliation and blindness equivalent to the theme of abuse of power but I am not sure about how to go about doing this. Could someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks a lot

EF_Sean 6 / 3481   Sep 11, 2009   #4 Start by asking yourself how the themes relate to one another? Do characters abuse their power out of blindness, for example? If so, the theme of blindness would seem to be at least as important, if not more so, than the theme of abuse of power. Reconciliation, on the other hand, only seems to happen as a result of abuses of power, so you might have a harder time elevating it, though you could probably think of a way to do so after a bit of brainstorming.

OP Summer103 1 / 2   Sep 12, 2009   #5 Thanks Sean, I have understood what you are trying to say above. I have included your advice with the theme of blindness. I am having a bit of trouble with the theme of reconciliation though. Reconciliation occurs in the play due to abuse of power, so I am struggling to argue that reconciliation is of a higher importance that the theme of the abuse of power.