Sophia Feist
Ms. Healy
English 7 AP, period 5
22.1.14
The Collapse of a King
Death and destruction collapse upon the society in King Lear’s former lands in William Shakespeare’s eponymous play. All tendrils of this wax from the king’s state- he finds himself with nothing after distributing his kingdom among the two more deceitful of his three daughters and exiling the last and most honest, Cordelia. Lear’s mendacious daughters are accused of being the architects of his sorry state, but the king himself creates the catalyst which begins his fall from the royal plinth of respect, wealth, and position upon which he stands into poverty by falling for chicanery and refusing advice.
In King Lear, Cordelia believes that her two older sisters have doomed their father to wallow in misfortune. She says to her father that there are “violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made.” (Shakespeare, IV.VII.33-34) Her father accuses himself of having alienated Cordelia, and is too ashamed to see her. She forgives him without a thought, recalling to “Reverence [her] father… as Nature requires” and in this electing to flatter her father and show him the love that she had previously refused to articulate (Secara). Lear, however, is aware of some fault on his part due to his foolish and impulsive behavior, as evidenced by his shame and apologies.
Lear’s foolishness puppeteers him through his devolution. The old monarch devises a system of determining inheritance that is anything but foolproof- he decides that the daughters who best profess their love for him will receive portions of his land. The king is then dissatisfied with anything but absolute and total adoration. He accepts the lies of his eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, who proclaim endless and complete love for him and none else, despite having husbands. He, however, rejects his youngest daughter, Cordelia, for her honesty in telling him that she loves him as a daughter should but “cannot heave [her] heart into [her] mouth.” (I.I.100-101) and that “when [she] shall wed, That lord… shall carry Half my love with him,” (I.I.110-113). He loves Cordelia dearly and most of his daughters and has years of evidence of her love but forgets all of this in the face of her frank lack of articulation. Lear’s slight was born of foolishness and led to his ultimate fall, as it caused him to exile Cordelia, who would have taken care of him and respected him when he had been treated discourteously by his two elder daughters, keeping him out of the tempest and possibly from insanity.
Had King Lear heeded the advice of those around him and not dismissed objectors in his rage, his folly might have been bridled. While impulsively dismissing Cordelia, Lear is confronted by a lord under him, Kent. Kent repeatedly attempts to intervene with advice, but is stopped by Lear. Once Kent manages to speak over the king’s furious warnings and hindrances, he says to Lear, “Reserve thy state, And in thy best consideration check This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgement, [Cordelia] does not love thee least, Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness.” (I.I.167-173) Kent’s advice on the truth of Cordelia’s sentiments towards her father is rewarded with exile, and the king’s plan to divide his kingdom between Goneril and Regan (with their respective husbands) is put into deed. Thus begins Lear’s disempowerment.
King Lear, angry with Goneril for asking him to dismiss half of his train, leaves her home in a fury, only to find himself unable to lodge with Regan. This example of foolishness is yet another means towards his end. Rashly, the king refuses to accept Goneril’s complaints that his knights are rambunctious, and leaves rather than cut his train (“Saddle my horses. Call my train together. Degenerate bastard, I’ll not trouble thee. Yet have I left a daughter.” (I.IV.262-264)). However, when Lear so proudly leaves, he finds that Regan will not take him without truncating his train yet further than Goneril might have, and when Goneril reappears, both sisters haggle until neither one is willing to accept a single servant to accompany their father. Thus, Lear is left with even less and wanders into a tempest, homeless and without recourse. His retinue, apart from the Fool and Kent in disguise as ‘Caius’, abandon him, as its members see that he has fallen from favor. In his wrath foolishness in leaving Goneril and refusing to heed her complaints, King Lear contributes to his own downfall.
Goneril and Regan, by deceiving their father, play the most direct role in orchestrating his downfall. However, King Lear might easily have prevented his decline had he been wise and made less rash decisions. By exiling Cordelia on the basis of a few words, giving away all of his land and power to Goneril and Regan with no precautions, refusing to heed advice, and leaving Goneril’s house at the slightest provocation (a complaint to him of his servants’ rowdiness) Lear does not arrest his fall as he might. These choices of his set up a situation in which Lear is unable to help himself and reliant on those daughters most unwilling to help him. The king might have heeded caution, conscience, or counsel and kept some modicum of power, but he did not and lost all that he had.
Works Cited
Secara, Maggie P. “Children and Childhood.” Elizabethan.org. N.p., 14 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 Jan. 2014. <http://elizabethan.org/compendium/40.html>.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square, 1993. Print.
Steven Alsheimer
AP Literature
1/21/14
Ms. Healy
The Family Tragedy
Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is truly tragic because of its universal theme of family. The tragedy is one of deception, and nothing is more devastating than deception within a family. “King Lear” uses the emotional power of deception within a family to give the play a wider audience than Shakespeare’s previous plays had. It could easily be argued that Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is really a play about the fall of a king. However, several nuances in the structure of the play and themes shared by characters highlight how destructive a family can be and make this the most important aspect. The changes Shakespeare made to the myth, the first 100 lines, and the parallelism between the two plots in the play all point to the play being about family, rather than royalty.
There are a couple of changes Shakespeare made to the original myth of Lear, changes that represent Shakespeare’s focus on family. The beginning of the play is often considered odd. In the myth from which Lear is inspired the characters of Gloucester and Kent do not even exist, and neither does the introduction used by Shakespeare’s Lear (Act 1, Scene 1, 1-92). The fact that Shakespeare changed this particular element relates to one of the other main elements Shakespeare changed, the ending of the play. The ending of the myth of Lear is heroic, while Shakespeare’s Lear is (as one would guess) tragic. Shakespeare changed these parts for his play to identify a particular theme. The beginning scene identifies the relationship between Lear and Gloucester. Gloucester speaks of his sons and Lear with his daughters. Already parallelism has been established, but it is not easily seen early on. It is in Act 3 Scene 3 when Gloucester sympathizes with Lear over his troubles, of his loss with his daughters that the parallel is more easily made. Gloucester states “The grief hath crazed my wits. What a night’s this!”(Act 3, Scene 3, 159). This line is telling in that in it Gloucester states that he is crazed like Lear, creating a great similarity. When Gloucester says, “What a night’s this!” (Act 3, Scene 3, 159), he is speaking with double meaning. This line is very significant. Gloucester is referring to the storm, which represents the climax. It is no coincidence that the climax of this story corresponds to the point where the two plot lines of the story (those of Lear and Gloucester) intertwine and meet in the same place, resulting in a similar fate. The reason this occurs is just as Shakespeare intended, to show that the main dramatic factor in the play is not from a loss of royalty but from the loss of trust in a family.
That these twin plots meet at the climax of the play is an indication that the play is a tragedy of family issues. As mentioned previously the storm being the climax and the two plots meeting directly implies a relationship. The piece of the story that Lear and Gloucester have in common is the abandonment of an honest family member. This is referred to by many as the main parallel between the main plot and the sub plot (plots of Lear and Gloucester respectively) (Maclean, Paragraph 15). If the main parallel between both plots of the play is family then one of the main themes of the play must also be family. However, there is more to it that just that. Shakespeare’s placement of the connection between both plots with the climax indicates a higher level of importance of this theme. The fact that this parallel exists throughout the entire book also implies that the element that creates this relation must be a fundamental impetus to the actions of the play. As one can see, both the climax of the play and the beginning of the play revolve around tragedy. Shakespeare further solidifies our belief in this tragedy of family by having both plot and subplot follow this path. The repetitive appearance of deceitful family members indicates commonality and universality. It is as if Shakespeare is providing us with an experiment and stating that since the results were the same in two groups, aside from one the results are more reliable and carry more accuracy towards future predictions. In this case the future prediction is heavy. It states that all families will endure such difficulties as they did in Shakespeare’s King Lear, and possibly take their plots to the same fate that Lear’s and Gloucester’s families endured at the end of the play. Shakespeare is here trying to say that all family leads to tragedy.
One of the main themes of the play is family issues, in fact most of the play’s actions are constructs of this particular theme. Several parts of the play point out that family issues are an important part of the play. The very beginning points out a similarity between the main and sub plots. The correlation between these plots implies universality of the theme. The fact that this element was not in the original myth indicates that Shakespeare added it in, as he did the monumental ending to the play. However it is in Act 3 Scene 3 that the parallel between the two plots is most evident, and here the climax occurs simultaneously to show that the events of the families are the important events. Finally, this indicated that aside from the historic ending to the play the main theme of the play, and the main impetus for the actions of the play is family, here is a tragedy about family, the greatest, most universal tragedy ever written.
Works Cited
Maclean, Norman. “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word.” Norman Maclean, King Lear Essay. University of Chicago, 2008. Web. 20 Jan. 2014.
Shakespeare, William, and Alan Durband. King Lear. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s, 1986. Print.
Adeline Almanzar
Ms. Healy
English 7 Pd 5
22 January 2014
Why Keep a Fool?
“Thou wouldst make a good Fool,” says the Fool to Lear in King Lear by William Shakespeare (1.5.38). Shakespeare writes Lear’s Fool, to be quite an audacious character. The Fool snaps snarky comments at Lear as if the Fool himself was the King and Lear the Fool. Lear, although at many times throughout the play unaware of these snarky comments, eventually gets irritated by the Fool’s words. Therefore, even though the Fool criticizes Lear, Lear keeps the Fool around because the Fool represents honest companionship and Lear has banished all of those he has trusted and loved.
In the beginning of the play, Lear asks his daughters to declare their love for him, but they eventually betray the love they so declared to be true. Goneril and Regan use fluttery language to showcase their “love” for Lear while Cordelia tells Lear what she is truly feeling, that she loves her father “according to [her] bond, no more nor less” (1.1.102). Her declared love was not enough for Lear. So, Lear shuns Cordelia, which marks the first betrayal, in his eyes, of his trust and the banishment of someone he considered a close friend. Cordelia is gone.
Right after Lear banishes Cordelia, Kent also betrays Lear. Kent states, “Royal Lear, whom I have . . . loved as my father, as my great patron thought on in my prayers . . . thy youngest daughter does not love thee lest” (1.1.155-171). Kent sides with Cordelia, so he gets banished by Lear as well. Kent in gone.
In Act 1, Scene 3, Goneril also betrays the love she declared to be true by refusing to house Lear’s knights in her castle. She expresses to Oswald that, “by day and night [Lear] wrongs [her]. Every hour he flashes into one gross crime or other that sets [them] all at odds” (1.3.4-7). In Act II, Scene 4, Lear eventually realizes that Goneril has betrayed his trust by not allowing him and his knights to stay with her. Regan sides with Goneril on the issue of the knights and tells Lear to apologize to Goneril. Regan, in Lear’s eyes, has now also betrayed him. Goneril and Regan are gone.
Now that all of the people who Lear loved or loved him are gone, the Fool shows up in the play, with great timing, in order to give Lear the gift of truth and companionship. The Fool’s first line is, “Let me hire him too” (1.4.96). Throughout the play, the Fool serves Lear as a trustful friend even though the Fool has quite the tongue. The Fool disses Lear with every chance he gets, “I had rather be any king o’ thing than a Fool. And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing I’ th’ middle” (1.4.189-192). Yet Lear keeps him because everyone else he trusted is gone; Lear has no one else but the Fool.
Along with the Fool’s appearance, the Fool’s disappearance symbolizes Lear’s replacement of a companion for Lear realizes that Cordelia was a source of truth and companionship. The Fool disappears in Act III, Scene 6, “And I’ll go to bed at noon” symbolizing the Fool’s metaphorical death (90). After Act III, Lear realizes that Cordelia was in fact the one who loved him most, therefore, marking the return of a true companion. Cordelia is back; Lear does not need the Fool anymore, so the Fool vanishes.
In a more Meta sense, Cordelia, herself, represented the Fool in such a way that she represented truth and companionship/love in Lear’s eyes. Once the Fool disappears, Lear realizes that Cordelia was telling the truth, at the beginning of the play, when she stated that she loved Lear so much so that she did not need to express it through fluttery language. Therefore, because the Fool and Cordelia represented truth and companionship, the Fool and Cordelia represent the same person (Mukherjee). This theory is further expressed in Act V, Scene 3, when Cordelia is hanged and Lear, holding her dead body, states, “And my poor fool is hanged” (370). The lack of capitalization of “the fool” symbolizes that Lear was not refereeing to his Fool but rather stating that Cordelia, herself, was a fool, a person of truth and companionship.
Therefore, in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear keeps the Fool around, regardless of his disrespectful banter, because Lear needs the companionship of someone who represents the truth. Lear banishes Cordelia, thinking that she was not truthfully showcasing her love, banishes Kent, thinking that he was siding with a traitor, and banishes Goneril and Regan, who proved that their declare of love was false. The Fool steps in to fill the gap of truthful companion. Once the Fool is gone, Cordelia is the newfound “fool” because she now represents the companionship of truth to Lear.
Works Cited
Mukherjee, Tarun T. “On the Character and the Dramatic Function of the Fool in
Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Http://freehelpstoenglishliterature.blogspot.com. Blogspot, 8 Dec. 2008. Web. http://freehelpstoenglishliterature.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-character-and-dramatic-function-of.html.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New Folger Edition ed. New York: Washington
Square, 1993. Print.
Sophia Feist
Ms. Healy
English 7 AP, Period 5
6.2.14
Two Plots Intertwined
Our show sought to explore an inquiry into the parallelism between the “unnaturalness between the child and the parent,” (King Lear, I.II.151-2) that occurs in both Lear’s and Gloucester’s family. We did this by creating a script that condensed scenes I and II of act I and was prefaced by a monologue spoken by Edgar towards the end of the play, which noted how similar the tragedies suffered in each of the parallel plots and families are. The commonalities can be traced through the play, but both stories start with consanguineous betrayal and deception. Edward lies to his father, Gloucester, pretending that Edgar is planning betrayal and patricide, and pretending to be the more loving son in order to increase his inheritance. Goneril and Regan deceive their father as well, exaggerating their sentiments towards him in order to inherit more of Lear’s kingdom. We expressed this by speaking those parts of scenes I and II of act I that were relevant to one another- the deception of the siblings and the exile or flight of the disadvantaged. We chose to cut Regan out of the scene, as we felt that she and Goneril share a twin role in the beginning of the play and that Goneril’s actions represented all that Regan’s did in Act I, Scene I.
Edmund and Goneril, Edgar and Cordelia, and Gloucester and Lear were each presented as pairs in our show. The first pair as the deceivers, the last as the deceived, and the middle as the honest victims of the actions of the deceived. We showed the similarities in character by having the same person voice both characters from each pair and by having the same person create both puppets. Each person created their puppets in their own way, and thus each set of characters was clearly identifiable as matched.
We used few props in the scene- just a crown and a letter. Each is a symbol of deception. The crown was originally Lear’s but was handed to Goneril as a prize for her mendacious flattery and symbolized her acquisition of the kingdom. The letter was of Edmund’s creation, but written as though it were from Edgar. It is a vital part of Edmund’s deception, as he shows it to Gloucester (faking unwillingness all the while) in order to have his father believe ill of Edgar and thus leave title and lands to Edmund. The letter that we made as prop actually had the text of the letter according to Shakespeare written on it.