The Greatest And Most Tragic Of Shakespeare 's King Lear

Shakespeare's King Lear is a play which shows the consequences of one man's decisions. The audience follows the main character, Lear, as he makes decisions that disrupt order in his Kingdom. When Lear surrenders all his power and land to his daughters as a reward for their demonstration of love towards him, the breakdown on order in evident. Lear's first mistake is to divide his Kingdom into three parts. A Kingdom is run best under one ruler as only one decision is made without contradiction. Another indication that order is disrupted is the separation of Lear's family. Lear's inability to control his anger causes him to banish his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and loyal servant, Kent. This foolish act causes Lear to become vulnerable to

In King Lear, Shakespeare portrays a society whose emphasis on social class results in a strict social hierarchy fueled by the unceasing desire to improve one’s social status. It is this desire for improved social status that led to the unintentional deterioration of the social hierarchy in King Lear. This desire becomes so great that Edmund, Goneril, Reagan and Cornwall were willing to act contrary to the authority of the social hierarchy for the betterment of their own position within it. As the plot unfolds, the actions of the aforementioned characters get progressively more desperate and destructive as they realize their lack of success in attaining their personal goals. The goals vary, however the selfish motivation does not. With

In the play King Lear by William Shakespeare, the Earl of Gloucester and King Lear both experienced a shift in their power and influence. Since Lear began the play with higher power he appeared to have experienced more loss. These two characters are foils of one another making their journey of power similar, a major theme in this play is loyalty, and new generations, both characters struggle with power relate to how the family interacted.

King Lear is an actor who can only play the king. Thus, after he has abdicated his throne, passing the authority to his posterity, he still demands respect and power, which he is unable to claim from any of his former subjects, even his daughters. And as a king with no kingdom, he is an actor with no role to play, the most loathsome of all conditions. Lear himself realizes this, and in scene 4, he cries: "Why, this is not Lear" (4.204). And later in the same speech, he says: "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (4.209). Lear is stuck in his role as king, unable to act in any other manner and powerless to provide for himself, causing the ultimate downfall of he and his

King Lear is a dramatic work of love, deceit, anger and betrayal of family members. In this particular work, the relationship among fathers and their children serve as the heart of the play. There is a dysfunction between Lear and his daughter as well as Gloucester and his sons. King Lear’s decision to divide up the kingdom to his daughters created a great conflict between the sisters. Shakespeare’s play also includes another family conflict in which Gloucester decides to give all his power and inheritance to his son Edgar and not Edmund. Edmund is known as the “illegitimate son” constructed from the fact that he was born from a woman who was not married to Gloucester. The unequal distribution of power within both King Lear’s and Gloucester’s

Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote the book Poetics. Poetics explains what goes into a tragedy to make a tragedy a “good tragedy”. Aristotle noted that there are six elements to a tragedy which are most important. These six elements being Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Melody, and Spectacle.

King Lear has a serious problem with keeping his composure throughout the story. His release of anger to all of his daughters and servants turned on him later in the story. King Lear has a blatant issue and should have done something about it, since he didn’t realize he was hurting the victim and proceeded to make them feel inferior to him.

In the play The Tragedy of King Lear, William Shakespeare conveys a power struggle between Lear´s good and loyal subjects, and those who were greedy and manipulative. King Lear split his kingdom among his two eldest daughters who relied on flattery rather than genuinity to portray their love for him, and banished his kind and honest daughter, Cordelia, for defying his expectation of insincere praise. From then on, there was a great deal of tension between the characters who wanted to take Lear down, and those who would try to protect him with their loyalty. The tension spiraled into a war. Shakespeare intentionally neglects details about the time period of the conflict in order for it to be portrayed as a quarrel between the virtues and

To begin with, it is certainly true that the main problem in English society was the great difference between the rich and the poor. When meeting Edgar who is pretending to be Poor Tom, Lear says, “Is man no more than this?” (King Lear 3.4.96-97). Lear asks this question prior to his anagnorisis, so he is still somewhat ignorant towards the lives of people other than his own. So, when he asks this question, it could be interpreted as him still believing that he is a supreme king, and that he is above man. So, when he asks this question, he would be asking if Poor Tom is representative of the common man. King Lear might be ignorant as to other people, but he is most certainly aware of the gap between the rich and the poor, so it seems like a genuine question coming from him. It is doubtful that he has had much interaction with the poor folk of his nation, so it is understandable that he would wonder if Poor Tom was all that the common men were -- crazy beggars. In addition to the acknowledgement of the large gap between the rich and the poor, the reader is able to see the effects of it. One of the greatest pieces of evidence for this is how quickly Lear falls from power. This is because in that England, people are either on top of the world, or on bottom, with not much in between. So, as soon as Lear gives up his power, people begin to treat him like dirt, and as soon as

When one contemplates the essence of being a king, one imagines that a king would never want for anything and that his later years would be carefree.  In reading King Lear, one sees a seamier side of life for a particular king.  Lear draws the audience’s attention to this in Act 3 when he cries out pitifully, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.”    Although Lear undoubtedly made a huge mistake when he divided his kingdom and banished two people who were very dear to him.  However, the sins his two ungrateful daughters committed against him far outweighed the wrongs he had done to others.

King Lear an imprudent, old man symbolizes selfishness like no other. What is most daunting is the fact that he is adamantly loyal to appearances and ranking in life. He carries a title which most can not even dream of attaining, but wants to give up the position and all the responsibilities that follow it. “ Know that we have divided/ In three our kingdom, and `tis our fast intent/ To shake all cares and business from our age” (1.1.37-39). It is quite understandable if he just wanted to end his reign as king, but it’s another thing when he also wants to bask in the glory of the title and be treated like he still owns it. This egotistical attitude of his is more annoying than anything else, for he brought forth all his problems upon himself, and also unto others. His most arrogant moment is at the very beginning of the play, when he demands his daughters to profess their love for him openly, “which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1.53). The use of his words in this quote is disgusting, it exudes pride, self-importance, and flattery. It’s because of these very words, that Cordelia denied him his right to the, all so selfish public display of love. Although Lear made costly mistakes throughout the play, his love to Cordelia rang

King Lear is frequently regarded as one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, and its tragic scope touches almost all facets of the human condition: from the familial tensions between parents and children to the immoral desires of power, from the follies of pride to the false projections of glory. However, one theme rings true throughout the play, and that very theme is boundless suffering, accentuated by the gruesome depictions of suffering our protagonists experience . There is no natural (nor “poetic”) justice depicted in this pre-Judeo-Christian world Shakespeare presents, as the relatively virtuous individuals (Kent, Gloucester, and Cordelia) in this

In these situations, the cast confronts instances of betrayal and eventually self-growth. The story initiates with King Lear’s urgency for flattery, which drives him to commit a decision that instigated the power-hungry course of his daughters. The betrayal of Goneril and Regan caused Lear to separate from his man-made principles and praise those of nature. Besides the change in Lear, the audience also observed Gloucester’s position concerning the legitimacy of his two sons. Societal views were a detriment regarding the rights of illegitimate children, like Edmund. Seeing his brother Edgar conquer all his father’s treasures, Edmund left his praise of nature behind and instead exploited the reliance of status and relationships in his royal family to overcome the laws of society, forming a great deception against his own family.

The subplot in King Lear is of Gloucester and his sons Edmund and Edgar. Edmund, the illegitimate, bastard son, can be seen as somehow unnatural according to the laws of society at that time. Gloucester himself says to Kent, regarding Edgar, "But I have, sir, a son by order of law..." (I.i. 18). The subtext here is that Edmund's conception was outside the law and unnatural to the social structure.

In Act one, scene one, we are introduced to Gloucester and his parallel plot line before we introduced to Lear. We find Gloucester acknowledging his equal adoration between his two sons, the one legitimate, the other illegitimate. The moral code that informs King Lear dictates that illegitimacy bodes nothing but a disadvantage to the harmony of underlying order . Within the terms of the play, Gloucester's emotion is a fatal flaw of judgment. Paying close attention to language, Gloucester's unwitting mistake from Edmund's very first appearance; in a world where the only vocabulary of each character is a full expression of their position on the axis of good and evil, a reader cannot help but notice that Edmund's "... I shall study deserving..."(I.i.24) is a foreboding of the deceit and greed that will taint him for the rest of the play.