KING LEAR

KING LEAR

1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT

   • WHEEL OF FORTUNE- Pictorial Concept that tries to explain why bad things happen to good/powerful people
     • One can be at top of wheel but chance/circumstances can turn the wheel suddenly as if by thrusting of a divine force
   • WHEEL OF FIRE - endless suffering
     • GREEK MYTH - Ixion murdered his father-in-law and Zeus purified him. Ixion betrayed this by trying to seduce Zeus's wife. Zeus punished Ixion by bounding him upon a fiery wheel
     • Lear thinks Cordelia is ungrateful but later realises that he was the ungrateful one by banishing Cordelia - so he thinks he is now "bound" to endless suffering"
     • Idea of wheel of fire happens in King Lear when Lear, rejected by G&R wanders on the heath, goes through a huge thunderstorm. Then Cordelia's followers find him asleep and take him to Cordelia
       • When he wakes up, he thinks he is in hell, where fire invades Ixion's wheel. Indicated by when Lear says "but I am now bound / upon a wheel of fire"

2. ANIMALS

   • In King Lear, refferences to animals constantly happens throughout - often as insults/curses
     • Lear, when angry at G&R says "Allow not nature more than nature needs,/Man's life is cheap as beast's"
   • Animals present a vision of brutal nature which man can descend - yet animals are also presented as less corrupt than men
     • After all beasts are just beasts, and are naturally brutal, but e.g. G&R are finely dressed human beings, who still act brutally, although this is not in their nature - they look for justification of their brutality through referrences to animals, but this is not valid