Close Study

What other soliloquies does Edmund have in the play? What do you learn about Edmund from his soliloquies as the play progresses?

Lear is not given any soliloquies. What is Shakespeare’s purpose in this decision?

Shakespeare’s Fool is a jester. The modern equivalent is the clown, the inheritor of a tradition that includes fools (simpletons and pretenders), jesters (sharp witted pranksters) and buffoons (knockabouts). The deepest and most sinister symbolism attaches to the fool, an ancient, inverted image of the king or ruler, used as a sacrifice for him in early sacrificial rituals. More generally the clown or fool represents and acts as scapegoat for human failure – the speed with which dignity and seriousness can collapse into farce, or wisdom turn into idiocy.

Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear is anything but a clown. He can speak truths the Lear that his most loyal supporter, Kent, is banished for saying.

Act 1 Scene 4 lines 125 – 143 develop a pun in the dialogue between Lear, Kent and the Fool. Explain the pun and trace the concept through the play.

How is the audience meant to respond to Kent? Give reason’s for your response?

King Lear is a play in five acts, as were his other plays and was a common form in his time. Act 1 establishes the behaviour and actions that prompt Lear’s downward spiral. The third Act is the point where Lear reaches his lowest point and Acts 4 and 5 build to the resolution from that point.

Apart from telling us where Lear is this speech performs an important function on the Elizabethan stage. What is that function?

Examine the speech for the images it generates? How has Shakespeare used language to create these images.

Lear’s speech initially reinforces the Gentleman’s words. Is Lear’s initial description stronger than the Gentleman’s? Examine Shakespeare’s use of language to support this view.

Through Lear’s speeches that follow, Shakespeare turns the description of the storm into a description of Lear’s state mind. The tempest on the heath is therefore symbolic. What would Shakespeare’s purpose be in doing this?

Trace the shifts in Lear’s mental state and the images he uses in his speeches.

Tragedy comes from the Greek, ’goat song’. Basically a tragedy traces the career and downfall of an individual, and shows in this downfall both the capacities and limitations of human life.

The protagonist may be superhuman, a monarch, or, in the modern age, an ordinary person. It is impossible to imagine a tragic action involving a group of people, but unless they were seen as in some way outside the rest of society, some of the essential quality of tragedy, which seems to include an element of the scapegoat or sacrifice (implicit in the derivation of the word ‘tragedy’), would be lost.

Shakespeare’s tragedies are characterised by their variety and freedom from convention. Shakespearian tragedy concentrates on the downfall of powerful men and often illuminates the resulting deterioration of a whole community around them. The protagonists are not necessarily good. Often the extent to which the tragic fall is deserved is left richly ambiguous. The relationship between human evil and the justice of fate is at the core of Shakespeare’s tragic interests, as are the morality and psychology of his characters.

Shakespeare’s protagonists are shown to be responsible for the choices that result in their downfall. This free will is obviously a Christian element. The paradoxical interdependence of good and evil in Christian thinking contributes to the special success of tragedy as a genre.

Elements of tragedy in King Lear: an oh! Too superficial overview

	Supporting evidence	Explanation
Career and downfall of an individual
Capacities of human life
Limitations of human life
Protagonist as a powerful man
Element of the scapegoat or sacrifice
Resulting deterioration of the whole community around them
Protagonist is not necessarily good
The tragic fall is deserved
The tragic fall is ambiguous
Protagonist is responsible for his own choices
Interdependence of good and evil