William Shakespeare 's King Lear

Insanity occupies an essential place in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, and is associated with both disorder and hidden wisdom. As King Lear goes mad due to dementia, the turmoil in his mind mirrored the chaos that has descended upon his kingdom. He initiated the unnatural sequence of events when he proclaimed that he desires to relinquish his duties as a monarchy and conferring them onto his children. At the same time, Lear’s dementia provided him with important wisdom by reducing him to his bare humanity and stripped him of all royal pretensions.

King Lear and Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, are two plays that reveal similar thematic elements, yet possess fundamentally different plot structures. Driven by the suffering and rage of two complementary characters, both plays suggest injustice through ‘good’, but ultimately flawed characters. This shared overarching theme is, however, conveyed differently within each of the works, as one employs two mainly disparate plot threads, while the other relies more heavily on the interaction between the two central plots. Yet the ultimate purpose of this dualism remains the same within both King Lear and Hamlet, in that Shakespeare’s use of the double plot illuminates the tragic elements within both plays, emphasizing core injustices through

Appalling acts of greed, horrendous acts of betrayal, and unchanging accounts of stubbornness weave throughout the entirety of the play “King Lear.” With heinous acts and equally despicable characters, “King Lear” flourishes with dramatic irony and tragedy. However, though the play “King Lear” is written as a tragedy, Shakespeare still manages to manifest a plethora of valuable life lessons within the play. Some of the life lessons learned in the play “King Lear” prove that loved ones can betray, greed can lead to despicable acts, and stubbornness can lead to irrational acts.

Of the deaths in Shakespeare’s King Lear, the death of Cordelia and King Lear at the end of Act V are most significant in revealing the development of Lear and how his development contributes to the theme surrounding it. The dynamic King Lear is a tragic hero whose fatal flaw, arrogance, prompts his removal from power and eventually the death of both himself and Cordelia. However, by the time of King Lear’s death, his arrogance has been replaced with a compassion which allows him to mourn the death of Cordelia and die from his own grief. Besides redeeming himself for his flawed judgement, the compassionate King Lear of Act V recognizes the loyalty in characters like Kent and Cordelia, while also seeing through the dishonesty of Regan and Goneril which fools the King Lear of Act I. King Lear’s transition from disowning Cordelia because of his arrogance to recognizing her as his only faithful daughter is demonstrated through Lear’s death, which serves as the culmination of his development and a reversal of his character. Furthermore, his death elaborates the theme of how someone’s arrogance may blind them from the reality of others’ intentions, which can be seen through a more compassionate and humble lens.

‘Apart from Lear and Gloucester, the dramatic persons fall naturally into two parties, good and bad. First we have Cordelia, France, Albany, Kent, Fool and Edgar. Second, Gonerill, Regan, Burgundy, Cornwall, Oswald and Edmund. But none are wholly good or bad except perhaps Cordelia and Cornwall respectively. (G. Wilson Knight, 1930)

Our fear and pity for Lear are both intensified and relieved. His disturbed conscious is magnified when he is mad, and the reality and his awareness is further denied by those sensible such as Edgar, Kent, ironically the Fool, and Albany. Although Scene 6 is written with intention to galvanize our fear and pity by presenting to us both Gloucester and Lear wretched circumstances, it also relieves both our understandings and our sentiment. Nevertheless, this tragic “relief” quickly turns into deceit. We learn of an old man seeking awareness in suffering to discover the subplot of another old man betrayed

William Shakespeare’s King Lear is the tragic story of a king’s descent from power as the life that he had once had crumbles before him. It is a story that relies heavily on the relationships between its characters and how they change. Lear is slowly driven insane throughout the course of the play as he unintentionally rids himself of the positive relationships while relying upon negative ones. However, it is Margot Heinemann’s argument that the play not only relies on interpersonal drama, but also the politics of England in her essay, “‘Demystifying the Mystery of the State’: King Lear and the World Upside Down”. In her essay, Heinemann provides an in depth analysis of how the politics of England when the play takes place, and also when the

King Lear follows the domestic troubles of two families and their subsidiary workers over the course of a few days in eighth century Britain. Throughout the play King Lear and his fellow nobleman, Gloucester, make several poor judgements based on tradition that send their familial relations in a downward spiral. In the paper Natural Justice and King Lear, Paul M. Shupack analyzes this phenomena and states “So long as people could persuade themselves that tradition defined what was natural and just, and so long as kings saw their role was to enforce traditional rights, the tension between law and morals remained hidden”(Shupack 67). Here Shupack recognizes that eighth century noblemen like Lear and Gloucester tended to approach justice traditionally. In the context

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the audience is confronted with many contrasts—a wise fool, reason in madness, insight of a blind man, and the power of the powerless. Through these contradictions, the audience and the characters are challenged to stop limiting what’s within by external appearances. In the beginning, King Lear holds a lot of political agency but has no power over his happiness as he looks to his daughters’ words of love for confirmation. The sisters that verbally express the most love turn out to be evil; the people Lear banishes turn out to be the most loyal. The audience realizes in the beginning that things are not always as they seem.

A struggle for supremacy between parent and offspring is a reoccurring theme throughout William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear. The play unfolds as King Lear is deciding how to divide his realm amongst his three daughters. Lear’s two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter their father with elaborate speeches of love hoping to inherit the largest piece of land. Unknown to Lear, his daughter’s so-called “unconditional” love for him is nothing more than an attempt to possess dominance over the kingdom. Consequently, an unnatural relationship between father and daughters is created due to the pursuit of power.

William Shakespeare displays how oppression can stem from a formerly unjust relationship in the play King Lear. While the character of King Lear descends into madness, his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, all suffer from the dominance of their father as he begs for their love. During this time of power transition, the daughters turn their oppressing father into the oppressed. Through the use of juxtaposition in how Lear's three daughters oppress him, Shakespeare conveys how previously oppressed people can free themselves from the ill-treatment and inflict pain on the former oppressor, a concept that is prevalent in today's society with the increase of sexual assault victims speaking out and exposing their perpetrator.

Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear can be interpreted in many ways and many responses. The imprecision’s and complication of the play has led

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

The opportunity to view both productions of King Lear has appeared twice for me in the past two years. The first time I viewed Trevor Nunn’s 2009 production of King Lear my review would have been based solely on my ability to understand the dialogue and my appreciation of the acting of Ian McKellen. Two years later I have a better understanding of the actual play and while I still enjoy the 2009 production the 1982 production directed by Jonathan Miller presents the words of William Shakespeare in a more accurate and period specific manor.

Lear's entry into the play is similar to Gloucester's such that, through close analysis of the dialogue between the King and his daughters, the reader gains awful knowledge of the arrogance and ignorance that will soon become his downfall . The drama of his opening speech is at all points excessive; the reader discerns a man that is long accustomed to being listened to and indulged in every way. In a moral