King Lear

King Lear

1. Love

2. Gender

3. Family

   • Reversal
     • Loyal and natural boy
     • I would divorce you from thy mother's womb
     • I cannot conceivve you
   • Animal imagery
     • Pelican daughters
     • Tigers, not daughters
     • How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child
     • Bestial chaos... The rule of tooth and claw (Barish & Waingrow)

4. Society

   • Charity
     • 'King Lear' is the story of how a king becomes a man (Kettle)
     • Expose thyself to what wretches feel
     • Man is no more than a poor, bare, forked animal
     • Off, off, you lendings! [Tearing at his clothes]
       • In his painful epiphany, the Pagan King for a moment understands the true nature of Christian caritas (shuger)
     • Humanism
       • King Lear may be seen as an exploration of what a truly humanistic society would look like, devoid of Christianity
       • Discoveries of New Worlds meant that Christian belief systems were being challenged
       • Measuring behaviour relatively: 'man is the measure of all things'
   • Illigitimacy
     • Why brand they us / With base?
       • Primogeniture excluded illegimate children; they were descriminated against by the law as well as society
         • Edmund is rejecting the fate that law have given him (Paul Kahn)
         • There was good sport in his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged
   • Individualism
     • The plague of custom
       • Extended metaphor of illness in association with society
         • Thou art a boil, a plague sore, or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood
           • In cursing Goneril, Lear curses himself (Knight)

5. Nothing

6. Madness

7. Age

8. Language

   • Failings of language
     • My love's, / More ponderous than my tongue
     • I do love you more than words can wield the matter
       • Adrian Nobel (1982): Goneril and Regan come downstage and face the audience during their speech, making ti seem impersonal and rehearsed
   • Language as a transaction
     • When she was dear to us, we did hold her so, / But now her price is fallen
     • Prize me at her worth
     • 'How much?' is the basic question of Capitalism (O'Toole)

9. Theology

   • Astrology
     • The stars above govern our condition
       • An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish despotism on the charge of a star
         • Astrology is disapproved of by Edmund, who views it - and Gloucester - as old fashioned, and so astrology functions as another divide between the generations
         • Richard Eyre (1998): Edmund was played as a malcontent scientist as a symbol for the generation gap between him and Gloucester, as well as representing him as a forward thinker
       • Gloucester believes that the planets have an effect over their lives
         • Queen Elizabeth regularly consulted her royal astrologer, although it was a school of through that was going out of date by the 1600s
         • These late eclipses of the sun and moon
   • The gods
     • As flies to wanton boys we are to the gods, / They kill us for their sport
     • Now gods, stand up for bastards
       • Edmund is only rejecting the fate that law has dealt him (Pal Kahn)
       • Bastards were thought to be cursed by God for their unlawful conception
     • [Kneels]
       • [Kneels] O you mighty gods, / This world I do renounce in your sights, / Shake patiently my great affliction off
       • Gloucester and Lear have parallel plots (Rudnysky)
       • A visual stock gesture of submission / devotedness to God
     • Micheal Elliot (1983): Emphasised the Pagan setting, the production begins at the Stonehenge
   • Christianity
     • I am tied to the stake
       • Refers to bear-baiting: brutality for fun
       • Like Jesus: self-sacrificial, persecuted for that of which he is not guilty
     • Holy water from her heavenly eyes
       • A Christian play about a pagan world (Maxwell)
       • Cordelia is a Christ-like figure (Elton)
       • Henry Irving (1892): Lear tastes Cordelia's tears during his reconciliation with Cordelia, baptism
       • Shakespeare was writing for a committed Protestant audience, who would've been increasingly familiar with biblical tales after Queen Elizabeth created a law that made attending church services on Sunday obligitory
     • [Kneels]
       • Here I stand your slave, / A poor, weak, infirm old man
         • Moses-like image, with a submission to God
           • In his painful epiphany, the Pagan King for a moment grasps the true nature of Christian Caritas (Shuger)
     • The Pagan references would've been measured against the Christian belief system of Shakespeare's audience
   • Fortune
     • The wheel is come full circle
     • Fortune, goodnight, smile once more, turn thy wheel
     • The Wheel of Fortune was a common theological idea dateing from Medieval times that showed that the proud could fall and the lowly could rise
       • Medieval art showed four inscriptions: 'I reign', 'I have reigned', 'I will reign', 'I have no sovereign power'

10. Nature

    • Nature as a goddess
      • Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear
      • Thou, Nature, art my goddess
      • All you unpublished virtues of the earth, / Spring with my tears
    • Powerful reminder of man's insignificance
      • Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes spout, / Til you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks
      • And thou, all-shaking thunder, / Strike flat the thick roundity o' the world, / Crack nature's mold
      • Man's life as cheap as beasts
    • Destructive
      • Humanity must prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep
        • Revelations 13
      • The Great Chain of Being showed man to be above animals: by comparing them to animals, man has shown a regression into a more primal state