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King Lear: critical context - Coggle Diagram
King Lear: critical context
George Orwell "The moral of King Lear" (1947)
subject of Lear is renunciation (giving up)
Lear falls into a rage which Tolstoy describes as strange and unnatural but which is perfectly in character
Lear is a mouthpiece for Shakespeare's own opinions- a mood of disgust at the rottenness of formal justice and vulgar morality and a mood of impotent fury
Lear realises as a sane man that power, revenge and victory are not worth while but he makes this discovery too late
to make yourself powerless is to invite attack
the vulgar, common sense moral drawn by he fool: "don't relinquish power, don't give away your land"
if you live for others you will find happiness but not if it is only a roundabout way of getting advantage for yourself
Sir Francis Bacon essays on revenge, envy and deformity (1696)
the ‘evil eye’ of envy is, like love, an all-
consuming passion
'Deformed persons [...] and Bastards are envious’ because those who can’t improve their own positions will do what can can to impair others'
bastards can be defined by their very nature as social outsiders; they are also seen as prone to cruelty.
Condemned by their illegitimacy to a marginal social role, they are scheming and subversive figures.
Born outside the patriarchal family they are also living proof of uncontrolled female desire.
Edmund is ruthless in his ambition to take land from his brother ‘Legitimate Edgar’- he resists customs that deny him right to inheritance demanding "now Gods stand up for bastards"
Don Foran "The Value of nothing in King Lear" (2008)
in truly intractable facts of our era (malnourishment, injustice, pollution) one yearns for vial truths
Kear, used to flattery of sycophants and empty formalities of kingship, is incapable of seeing value of honest love
most powerful and important motif is the theme of nothing- Shakespeare asks what is the value of nothing?
theme of nothing points up Lear's most tragic choices: to invest rather than divest and mistake affectation for affection
only after being subjected to unbuffered realities he affirmed "necessity can make vile things precious"
Edgar chooses to divest himself of everything even his identity
Gloucester experiences like Edgar the value of nothing and the importance of naked truth and personal integrity
suffering endows the sufferer with insight and meaning
in our contemporary world we could attend to this complex metaphor of the value of divestment
Gloucester comments on the fundamental blindness of those "who will not see because they do not feel"
the powerful should shun the "everything" of illusion for the "nothing" of value, truth and compassion
Cordelia knowing what she risked chose to love truthfully and when we can do that we too can be still
Micheal Ridge "Giving the dead their due"
responses surrounding the newly deceased are a complete rarity
Mendes production: the fools is beaten to death and Lear barely gives a sideways glance to where he lay
characters allow themselves the opportunity to deny exactly how grim their situation has become and keep the hope
Cornwall and first servant dies and Regan conducts her business as if nothing has occurred- on stage servants do nothing to stop the deaths
Cordelia's death- first moment where audience is allowed to see a character truly react to another's death- more powerful
characters hope with complete delusion that things will soon right themselves and the previous status quo will be reestablished
ending shows bleak tragedy and senseless violence established