Goneril & Regan

Goneril & Regan

1. Animal Imagery

   • 'Tigers not daughters'
   • 'Sharp toothed unkindness, like a vulture
   • Most Serpent like
     • Gilded serpent
       • Regan is targeting Lear's weak spots which enrages him
       • Conniving
       • devious
   • 'She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab/Thou canst tell why one's nose stands i'th' middle
     • Lear's experience with one will be as sour as with the other
     • The Fool tells Lear that Regan will be just like Goneril
   • Those Pelican daughters
     • young pelicans were thought to attack their parents; and it was believed that adult parents fed the young on their own flesh and blood
   • Like monsters of the deep
   • Devil
   • Dogs
     • they bark at me
       • Comparing Goneril & Regan to dogs
     • Kent- dog hearted daughters
       • dog eat dog world

2. Evidence of Evil

   • We must do something in i'th' heat
     • Strike while the iron is hot
     • Heat = Hell; Passion; and Sin
   • Pray you, let us hit together
     • Plotting Lear's downfall
   • yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself
     • Demonstrates their deceit after using hyberbolic language
     • Lear does not know what he is doing
   • Lear
     • I'll not weep
       • Externally the world is weeping
         • The Storm
         • Causes Lear to become 'mad'
           • I shall go mad
     • 'Those wicked creatures yet do look well favoured
       • Regan and Goneril are playing Lear
         • Barganing him down to 0 men
         • And in good time you gave it
           • I gave you all
     • Your kind old father, whose frank heart gave all
       • sympathetic
       • old= kind

3. Reason for their evil - Lear

   • 'Infect her beauty
   • You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powe'rful sun/ To fall and blister her
     • Lightening, fog & blistering sun
       • foreshadowing his treatment
       • Pagan vision of hell
   • You unnatural hags,/ I will have such revenges on you both/ That all the world shall -I will do such things.
     • Lear
       • Childish
       • Fantasising
   • See what breeds about her hear/ Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts
     • Possibly ironic because Lear is the cause

4. Evidence against Evil

   • Goneril has manners and courtesy whereas others have true base villany

Images and files in the map