KING LEAR

Generational strife/gap universal

Jobs sufferings not the model for Lear.
Lear and Solomon model when hes an old monarch, at the end of his reign. James Is wished-for archetype.
A paradigm (example) for greatness (not about the catastrophes of kingdoms) not sufficiently emphasized.
Excess: everyone either loves or hates too much.
The only authentic love is between parents and children but the prime consequence is devastation.
Love is no healer; it starts all the trouble; is a tragedy in itself.
Outrages our universal idealization of the value of familial love.
Love (filial/paternal) stronger than death, but it leads only to death.
We are all fools victims.
What can it tells us about Edmund, and also Lear, that Shakespeare found nothing for them to say to each other? (501)
Four great roles:
o Lear
Pattern of all impatience, though he vows otherwise; urges patience on the blinded Gloucester.
Image of male authority: father, king, mortal god.
Loved by the good characters. Hated/feared by the bad ones.
Crucial he is lovable, loving and loved by anyone worthy of our own approbation.
Dies of joy hallucinates that Cordelia hasnt died or that she resurrected. He and Gloucester are slain by their
paternal love.
Universal image of wisdom and destructiveness of paternal love; persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid
of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.
o The Fool
Humanizes Lear; makes him accessible to us.
True voice of our feeling.
His acute ambivalence toward Lear, founded upon an outrage at Cordelias exile and Lears self-
destructiveness, is one of Shakespeares crucial inventions of human affect.
Thou hast pared thy wit oboth sides, and left nothing Ithmiddle. Lear becomes nothing by dividing his
sovereignty between Goneril and Regan.
For him Lear is culpable for having forsaken his own fatherhood to divide his kingdom and betray royal
authority was also to abandon Cordelia.
Understood only by the audience and Kent; almost never by Lear, who listens yet never hears.
Symbol of common sense and honesty. His license to speak freely allows him to say honest observations and
make evident the madness of his king. Irony: a greater man (like Kent) if he gives the same advices as the
Fool will end up expelled from the kingdom or executed.
o Edmund
Plays great villain. Ice-cold. Total freedom for all familial affect.
Nature, invoked by himself as his goddess, destroys him through the natural vengeance of his brother. Edmund
is immune from love he has mistaken his deity.
Strategist, not improviser.
Edmund has no passions whatsoever; he has never loved anyone, and he never will.
A desire for power with no particular purpose behind it.
Represent Christopher Marlowe: pagan atheist and libertine naturalist.
Revolt against authority and tradition for revolts own sake.
I am here here I started originally, that to have been born a bastard was to start with a death wound.
Radical change at the end. He realized he was beloved this evidence of connection moves him.
We like him more when he is evil.
o Edgar
Sullen melancholia/depression.
Why does he assume the lowest possible disguise?
He refuses his own identity not for practical purposes (or not only for them).
Greatest proof of this refusal: unwillingness to reveal himself to his father (even after he rescues him two times
murder and suicide).
Why did Shakespeare choose not to dramatize the event (Edgar revealing himself to his father)?
Central consciousness.
Ripeness is all
 Final wisdom submit to the weight of this sad time.
Horror of female sexuality, the dark and vicious place.
Important passages
o King Lear and blind Gloucester in 4.6, ln 80-185.
o Edmund in 1.2, ln 9-15. Edgar in 5.3, ln 169-72. Lear in 4.6, ln 123-28.
o Lear and the Fool in 1.4, ln 223-28. 2.4, ln 118-23.
o Fool in 3.2, ln 79-95.
After this, the Fool ceases to madden Lear and then he vanishes.
William Blake.
Ironic.
Condemnation of a Jacobean England. (p.498)
o 5.1. Edmunds soliloquy
o Lear in 1.1, ln 107-19