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by William Shakespeare

King Lear

Lear Gloucester

Goneril

Regan

Cordelia

Edmond

Edgar

Kent

Edgar

Lear

Goneril

Regan

Cordelia

Set in ancient Britain

King Lear’s kingdom is to be divided among his 3 daughters:

1. Goneril- wife of an Albanian duke

2. Regan- wife of the Duke of Cornwall

3. Cordelia- soon to be married to the French King or a French duke

(Chute 207 and Magill 442-3)

• King Lear puts his daughters to a test to see who loves him the most

• Lear asks his daughters to express their affections for him. Appealing to his vanity, the two oldest cajole him with pretexts of affection. Each get one third of his kingdom.

• Though she loves her father, the youngest refuses to cajole her father into getting the last third of his possessions “then let truth alone be your dowery” (2.1).

• King Lear disowns his youngest daughter and gives the rest of the land to the other two (which means1/3 of land is divided into 2 and added to the 1/3 already received) What does this equal?

• His subject, Kent, disagrees with the king’s decision and is consequently banished. But being the dear friend, he disguises himself to care for the aging king.

• Because she has no dowery, the Duke no longer wants Cordelia as his bride, but the French king does.

½ the land

• King Lear plans to stay with each of his eldest daughters for a month

somewhat to test them

somewhat to stroke his ego

• This displeases the two daughters:

neither wants to deal with the old man,

but both are blatant cajolers, typical of courtiers of the time.

Cordelia to her father:“My love’s more rich than my tongue.” (1.1)

Lear to Cordelia:“Nothing will come of nothing.” (1.1)

Lear’s soliloquy:“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” (1.4)

Lear to all:“Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest.” (1.4)

Lear Gloucester

Goneril

Regan

Cordelia

Edmond

Edgar

Kent Edgar

Similarly…• The Earl of Gloucester is conflicted with his

sons• Edmund- illegitimate son, cunning villain• Edgar- legitimate son, good, betrayed by bro

• Edmund makes his father believe that Edgar is trying to kill him.

• Edmund does this in order to gain exclusive control of his father’s land.

• King Lear visits Goneril first

• She hates her father’s presence and tries to control her father. This only enrages him and hastens his senility.

• Her husband tries to calm King Lear fearing retribution, but Lear leaves to visit the second daughter.

https://secure.nypost.com/seven/09072007/photos/ent076a.jpg

• The banished Earl of Kent (sympathetic to Cordelia) disguises himself

and becomes King Lear’s new servant in order to protect his king/friend

from his own daughters.

http://dmystudio.com/act/simpleBlue/p7hg_img_1/fullsize/gal4_fs.jpg

• King Lear sends a servant (his good friend) with a letter to Regan.

• Goneril also sends a servant with

a letter to Regan.

• Edmund convinces his father that

Edgar wants both of them dead.

• In order to protect his pretext, Edmund convinces Edgar to flee, and then Edmund incriminates him in a conspiracy (treason).

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shotgunplayers.org/archive/seas15/KingLear/images/klscene.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shotgunplayers.org/archive/seas15/KingLear/index.cfm&usg=__o1wm_hEqn9mHpgyYJx9O2t-DoZc=&h=3008&w=2000&sz=758&hl=en&start=52&tbnid=tBJJ3efIrjm1PM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=100&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dking%2Blear%2Bregan%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN%26start%3D40

• King Lear still believes Regan will be kind to him, but he soon finds out otherwise.

• She, too, insults him and ridicules him driving him further into senility.

• King Lear and his servant (Kent incognito) escape into a storm.

• Gloucester is worried and urges Lear to find protection under the French King and Cordelia’s protection.

• Ironically for his service, Gloucester was blinded by the servants of Goneril and Regan.

• http://s3.amazonaws.com/rscmedia01/explore/multimedia/photos/kle_0704_02019.jp

Lear to Kent (incognito):

“I am a man more sinned against than sinning.” (3.2)

• The French army led by the French King will take back Lear’s throne.

• Like Kent, Edgar also has disguised himself as a fool rather than leave his father unprotected.

• Upon finding Gloucester blinded,

Edgar promises to help the old

man find his hut.

http://www.nesetheatre.org/slides/GloucEdgar08Small.jpg

• Gloucester plans to kill himself and wants the fool (disguised Edgar) to lead him to Dover to do so.

• Because Edgar is protecting his father, Gloucester survives. As a result, he feels it is a miracle and is determined to carry on.

• Regan’s husband dies in a battle against the French king, but she receives the affections of Edmund.

• Jealous, Goneril vies for his attentions.

• Edgar captures Goneril’s servant, and in his pocket, Edgar finds a letter to Edmund from Goneril instructing him to kill her husband and betroth her.

http://www.collingswoodshakespeare.org/Images/lovetriangle.jpg

• King Lear, guided by the disguised Kent, finds refuge with Cordelia. Cared for with kindness and tenderness, King Lear regains his sanity and sees the truth.

• Weeping, he regrets his errors.

• Meanwhile, Gloucester, too, is furnished with the truth when Edgar reveals himself to his father just before Gloucester dies in Edgar’s arms.

Gloucester is dead.

• However, a battle is still taking place between France and England.

• Edmund was arrested for treason against King Lear, but Regan sides with Edmund and claims she wants him as her husband.

• Goneril, jealous, poisons her sister.

• Edgar shows up with the letter indicting Goneril against her husband, so she stabs herself.

Regan is dead.

Goneril is dead.

• Edmund dies in battle with the satisfaction that two women died fighting over him.

• With a small bit of remorse, Edmund sends Edgar to have the order changed, but it is too late. Cordelia, too, is charged with treason, but she is hanged.

• Her death breaks Lear’s heart, and he dies.

• Edgar and Goneril’s repentant husband alone survive to rebuild Britain.

Edmund is dead.

Cordelia is dead.

King Lear is dead.

King Lear• Simple character who learns to see beyond

appearances into the heart of a person• Tragic hero because despite the tragedies of his

own making, we still feel sympathy for him

• Foolish

• Blinded

• Ego-centric

• Conceited

……………… fatherly

………………… . . .wise………………insightful

………………… caring

Other Facts• King Lear may also be compared to King

Solomon in the way that his kingdom is also divided.

Machiavellian villain = Edmund

insatiable ambitionwithout own passiongrim cynical sense of humorheartless; at his death minor remorse

Critics

• “The themes in William Shakespeare's King Lear are patience, justice, religion, nature, madness and insight. When this play is viewed from a feminist perspective, it is appearant [sic] that the behavior of the female characters stemmed from the king's inability to follow the social rules of Elizabethan England” (McLeish 1103).

Critics

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge says of King Lear: “Of all Shakespeare's plays Macbeth is the most rapid, Hamlet the slowest in movement. King Lear combines length with rapidity,—like the hurricane and the whirlpool absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the tempest” (McLeish 1102).

http://twi-ny.com/kinglear.jpgOnce judgmental Lear becomes

repentant Once blinded

Gloucester becomes insightful

In 1929, Somerville[13] reviewed the case of the old king from the positions of contemporary British psychiatry, with a few psychoanalytical references. The author remarks that from the very outset of events Lear shows "signs of mental deterioration due to old age," and that "for all useful purposes his career is finished."

A later author, Kellogg[3] in 1866 equated the original mental disorder in Lear to senile dementia.

Among the most perspicacious comments on King Lear are those of Bucknill.[2] He wrote: "The willfulness with which critics have refused to see the symptoms of insanity in Lear, until the reasoning power itself has become undeniably alienated, is founded upon that view of mental disease . . . that insanity is an affection of the intellectual, and not the emotional part of man's nature."

According to Ray,[4] healthy and pathologic features of Lear's mind are so "mingled and assimilated," that "we feel at last as if it were the most natural thing in the world that Lear should go mad."

Most authors conclude that the king's mental disease is evident from the opening scene of the tragedy. Brigham[12] plainly states that Lear "was insane . . . from the beginning of the play, when he gave his kingdom away, and banished as it were Cordelia and Kent . . . . The ill-usage of his daughters only aggravated the disease and drove him to raving madness."

Finally, in 1988, we encounter a work by Trethowan,[15] who thinks that Lear was actually depressed,

Colman[7] established for Lear a diagnosis of brief reactive psychosis with a background of organic mental disorder, perhaps of a vascular origin, exemplified by the king's visual hallucinations and an intimation of a stroke just before Lear's death,

In his 1983 article, Kail[6] takes an interesting excursion into the history of psychiatry, as it relates to Shakespeare, and also diagnoses in Lear "a case of progressive senile dementia" that is "accompanied by attacks of what could be described today as acute mania, as demonstrated by his faulty judgment, disorientation and irrational behavior."

In 1976, Andreasen[5] stated that "Lear's madness can be explained in part as the development of a psychotic disorganization precipitated by severe stress in an elderly man already showing some signs of senile organic brain disease."

In 1953, Donnelly,[14] a psychiatrist and analyst, described "the type of reaction from which Lear suffers as either a delirium or an acute schizophrenic-like episode," but strongly favored the former.

WebMD