KING LEAR DISCUSSION POINTS BY THEME

KING LEAR DISCUSSION POINTS BY THEME

1. GENDER

   • Gonerill and Regan portrayed as monstrous / inhuman in their rejection of stereotypically female roles
   • Cordelia a passive stereotypical female, conforming and feeding the patriarchy, thus is celebrated and portrayed as a christ figure
   • the whole play can be seen as Lear having a huge crisis of masculinity; the Fool is the son he never had, and he feels the ultimate threat from his female subordinates
   • it is the patriarchal characters that win (as it were); Edgar is left to be king, Kent as the eternally loyal and unchallenging servant survives and Cordelia is martyred
   • the bastard as equal to the woman in society - thus Edmund is more affiliated with the female characters of the play

2. NIHILISM

3. FATE VS FREE WILL

4. THE GODS

5. POWER AND SOCIETY

   • power corrupts - increasing unease of both protagonists with their role
   • realisation of the plight of the working class (hugely distanced from the story at hand)
   • the use of subplot shows how Lear is not the only consideration of the play
   • why doesn't Cordelia humour Lear and prevent everything that then resulted? Potentially because absolute power cannot be preserved, and Lear needed to be stopped in some way
   • Lear's 'scurvy politicians' and 'a dogs obeyed in office' quote shows his reason in madness - the realisations he has after his downfall include political realisations
   • the conflicts in the play could represent conflicts of ideology; the archaic vs the modern re inheritance, the feminist vs the patriarch, individualism vs determinism
   • money = power; when L + G lose all their power they are degraded to a level of poverty
   • some semblance of a challenge from the workers - the challenge by Cornwall's servant, Edmund's challenge, the knights supporting Lear, and the Fool / Kent's ceaseless faith to Lear

6. NATURE