King Lear – Tragedy

Dividing up the Kingdom

At the beginning

Lear is King of BritainGloucester (pronounced Gloster) is a

DukeBoth are in high positions “halfway

between earth and sky”This is a pre-Christian Britain

Lear’s 3 daughters

Goneril and Regan tell their father how much they love him so they can get shares of the kingdom

Cordelia refuses to play the game

Gloucester’s two sons

Edgar is older and legitimateEdmund is younger and illegitimate

Edmund pretends that he has received a letter from Edgar suggesting treachery against Gloucester

Gloucester is gullible and actually Edgar is, too – they both do and believe what Edmund tells them

Eventually, Edgar is forced to flee because Gloucester believes Edgar has betrayed him

King Lear is outside

He is in a raging storm which is both external and internal because he is going completely insane

He is returning to nature

Cornwall (Regan’s husband) pulls out Gloucester’s eyes on

stageThis is in revenge because

Gloucester has gone out to see King Lear in his little hut and has tried to help him

Lots of plot

Edgar, naked and pretending insanity, finds his father and leads him around

His father, Gloucester, wants to commit suicide by jumping off the cliffs at Dover,

Edgar helps him by letting him jump off a little bump in the ground

Then Edgar pretends to be somebody else at the bottom of the cliff

More plot

Cordelia and her husband, the King of France, come to England to fight the other two sisters and rescue Lear.

They find Lear insane and try to heal him. He gets well enough to have a small reconciliation with Cordelia.

Cordelia loses the war and she and Lear are taken prisoner.

Cordelia dies (Edmund’s orders)

Everybody dies

Edgar kills EdmundRegan dies of poison and Goneril

commits suicideKing Lear and Gloucester dieEdgar becomes King

Major themes Edgar, Edmund, and Gloucester – their plot and the issue of

free will Return to the debate between Edmund & Gloucester

about responsibility for one’s actions Paganism and Christianity in the play

Cordelia 4.4.26+ “As flies to wanton boys” scene 4.1.40+ Kent – “It is the stars” 4.3.38+

Gloucester and his eyes How he begins actually to “see” 4.1.18+

“I see it feelingly” 4.6.164 Seeing as a major theme of the play It may go with the theme of reading letters

Wisdom and foolishness

King Lear’s fool is wiser than heThe fool tells him that he is the fool – and he is

Major themes, continued

Interior = ExteriorKing himself is the land – divide the

kingdom and the king loses his psychic integrity

Storm scene: madness of nature & of Lear

Existentialism: What is “unaccommodated man”?

Lear and the storm scene –Wheel of fortune – “I am bound upon a wheel of fire

4.7.52+Lear and the trial of his daughtersThe Fool and Edgar on the Great Chain

Meta-theatre – “this great stage of fools” 4.6.200

Lear comes to recognition?what Lear learns: his prayer 3.4.31+Unaccommodated man speech 3.4.107+

Lear turns around, anagnorisis (recognition)

Akira Kurosawa’s Ran

Kurosawa’s version of King Lear = Ran, the fool: “Are there no gods?”, trailer

Finally

Great Chain of BeingParallel plots – or not so parallel?Edgar and existentialism and Early

Modernism