Hi im having difficulty understandig what is needed for king lear essays, ive studies several productions but have not been told what to look for in them..i have heard that we are meant to talk about the different readings...could someone explain this to me or extend upon it
-
Best of luck to the class of 2024 for their HSC exams. You got this! Let us know your thoughts on the HSC exams here -
YOU can help the next generation of students in the community! Share your trial papers and notes on our Notes & Resources page
King Lear readings (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter JLR
- Start date
goan_crazy
Hates the waiting game...
Have u tried the king lear FAQ?http://www.boredofstudies.org/community/showthread.php?t=69234
or the resources section?
or the resources section?
goan_crazy
Hates the waiting game...
READINGS thanks 2 silvermoon
READINGS:
REVISIONIST:
Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear in 1681 to suit contemporary tastes. Tate not only overhauled Shakespeare’s language, he drastically altered the structure of the play and its plot, changed several characters, introduced a new one (Arante, Cordelia’s confidante) and eliminated the Fool. He restored the happy ending of the Lear legend – Lear has his kingdom restored and bequeaths it to the lovers Edgar and Cordelia while he, Kent and Gloucester retire to ‘some cool cell’.
CHRISTIAN:
One influential line of criticism has insisted that King Lear is nothing les than a Christina tragedy. This view draws away form the actual structure of events that make up the tragedy – the disproportion between Lear’s folly ad his suffering; the even more monstrous disparity in the case of Gloucester, the gratuitous of Cordelia’s death. Such an approach tends to stress the final reconciliation and restoration of order and concentrates on certain key passages which seem to have a redemptive or transcendental import.
-Cordelia’s words ‘O dear father/It is thy business that I go about,’ (iv iv 24-25) with their biblical echo
-the implications of resurrection to a new life in Lear’s ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave.’ (iv vii 45)
-Lear’s speech ‘…come, let’s away to prison…’ Either Lear or Cordelia or both are seen as Christ figures in this interpretation and whole action as a broadly allegorical account of the human soul purged through suffering.
HUMANIST:
This interpretation sees Lear’s long agony as a necessary process in his moral education and Cordelia as the embodiment of a purely human combination of integrity and charity. Though there is much suffering, it is not purely wanton, in that it gives us a more exalted sense of the human spirit and its potentialities, ie there is meaning in suffering and therefore in human existence.
G.K. Hunter: “At the beginning of the play he [Lear] is incapable of disinterested love, for he uses the live of others to minister to his own egotism. His prolonged agony and his utter loss of everything free his heart from the bondage of selfhood. He unlearns hatred, and learns love and humility. He loses the world and gains his own soul.”
ABSURDIST:
Jan Knott sees Shakespeare’s tragedy as having the same general progression as Beckett’s drama and employing some of the same theatrical techniques.
The Absurdist view draws a distinction between the world of tragedy, where suffering is real but also heroic, enabling and therefore meaningful, and the world of the grotesque which poses the same questions as tragedy (about the nature of suffering, man’s relation to the gods and the problem of pain and evil) but returns radically different answers. King Lear, according to Knott, shows us a tragic hero who is unaware that he inhabits the world of the grotesque – a Job whose sufferings are unredeemed by the existence of a finally omniscient and loving God.
HISTORICAL:
This approach tries to recapture the play as it seemed to the original audience with their religious, political and social ideas and prejudices. Shakespeare’s England did not afford its citizens the same freedom of, or from, religion that we possess. A few years BEFORE King Lear, the playwright Thomas Kyd had literally been tortured for expressing scepticism about Orthodox Christianity. Shakespeare is saying, as clearly as he can, what many people in his own day must have believed secretly. There is no God. The comforts of religion are make-believe. Nor are we good by nature, or through our laws and customs. The only hope for human beings is that we can try to be decent and generous with one another.
The threat of Civil War raises a point that was important to Shakespeare; the belief in that personal immorality in the ruling class is a disease that spreads evil through society, in extreme cases causing it to fall apart. Britain at large is rescued from the evil that had overrun the highest reaches of its society. Civil War in Britain is avoided and the French invasion caused by Lear’s lack of judgement is defeated by Albany. The play is thus supportive of civil authority; the catastrophe of Lear’s reign might be compared by the 17th century playgoer with the strength and harmony from that of James.
FEMINIST:
Ina feminist reading of the text King Lear becomes an exercise in patriarchy and misogyny. There is an equation within the play between human nature and male power, ie it is the natural state of human beings to have a masculine force fulfilling the key power roles of society. The connection is made between female insubordination and anarchy – women must function within their delineated roles or chaos and tragedy results. The only form of social organization strong enough to hold chaos at bay is the institution of male power and the centre of corruption is female lust.
FREUDIAN:
Freudian interpretation positions the three daughters as symbolic representations of Lear’s own psyche. They represent the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman – the mother who bears him, the companion of his bed and board and his destroyer. Cordelia represents death, as ‘dumbness’ is a familiar representation of death. The final image of the play (Lear carrying the dead Cordelia in his arms) was reversed with the Freudian framework, as Cordelia became the Death Goddess, bearing Lear away, rather than the reverse.
POLITICAL:
Readings have included King Lear (directed by Imse Csisar 1981) as a political parable about the decline of authority in Eastern Europe in the 80’s set in an abandoned factory, the decaying of the building mirrored not only by the decay of Lear and his kingdom but the decay in Eastern Europe. The play becomes a war between capitalist and Marxist ideologies and the driving force in Lear’s downfall industrial greed. The film Ran (directed by Akira Kurosawa 1985) is set in Japanese Gekokujo, a period in early 16th Century when the government had broken down and Japan was ravaged by contending warlords. Kurosawa’s vision of the cyclic nature of human history and the mid-eighties context of widespread warfare and rapidly escalating arms race signified the state of humanity as a ‘confused and lonely state of affairs with evil apparently ascendant and the Buddha and gods ineffectual in the face of human suffering.”
DOMESTIC:
Sir Richard Eyre: “The play is for me unambiguously a domestic play that has the metaphor of the state laid on top of it. Every family is a state in miniature that has a ruler and that’s the patriarchal ruler, the father.
“The Lears are the archetypal dysfunctional family – a widowed father with three daughters – Goneril, the oldest, bullied from birth, Regan the middle child with a kind of manipulative relationship with her father, and Cordelia, the youngest, bestowed with all Lear’s unqualified and unexamined love.
“When a parent is rejected by a child, or when a child is rejected by a parent, it’s the most profound rage and despair that human beings are capable of. The story of King Lear is the education of two tyrannous fathers, Lear and Gloucester. It’s a lesson in how to love your children and it’s the most brutal and painful form of education.”
READINGS:
REVISIONIST:
Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear in 1681 to suit contemporary tastes. Tate not only overhauled Shakespeare’s language, he drastically altered the structure of the play and its plot, changed several characters, introduced a new one (Arante, Cordelia’s confidante) and eliminated the Fool. He restored the happy ending of the Lear legend – Lear has his kingdom restored and bequeaths it to the lovers Edgar and Cordelia while he, Kent and Gloucester retire to ‘some cool cell’.
CHRISTIAN:
One influential line of criticism has insisted that King Lear is nothing les than a Christina tragedy. This view draws away form the actual structure of events that make up the tragedy – the disproportion between Lear’s folly ad his suffering; the even more monstrous disparity in the case of Gloucester, the gratuitous of Cordelia’s death. Such an approach tends to stress the final reconciliation and restoration of order and concentrates on certain key passages which seem to have a redemptive or transcendental import.
-Cordelia’s words ‘O dear father/It is thy business that I go about,’ (iv iv 24-25) with their biblical echo
-the implications of resurrection to a new life in Lear’s ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave.’ (iv vii 45)
-Lear’s speech ‘…come, let’s away to prison…’ Either Lear or Cordelia or both are seen as Christ figures in this interpretation and whole action as a broadly allegorical account of the human soul purged through suffering.
HUMANIST:
This interpretation sees Lear’s long agony as a necessary process in his moral education and Cordelia as the embodiment of a purely human combination of integrity and charity. Though there is much suffering, it is not purely wanton, in that it gives us a more exalted sense of the human spirit and its potentialities, ie there is meaning in suffering and therefore in human existence.
G.K. Hunter: “At the beginning of the play he [Lear] is incapable of disinterested love, for he uses the live of others to minister to his own egotism. His prolonged agony and his utter loss of everything free his heart from the bondage of selfhood. He unlearns hatred, and learns love and humility. He loses the world and gains his own soul.”
ABSURDIST:
Jan Knott sees Shakespeare’s tragedy as having the same general progression as Beckett’s drama and employing some of the same theatrical techniques.
The Absurdist view draws a distinction between the world of tragedy, where suffering is real but also heroic, enabling and therefore meaningful, and the world of the grotesque which poses the same questions as tragedy (about the nature of suffering, man’s relation to the gods and the problem of pain and evil) but returns radically different answers. King Lear, according to Knott, shows us a tragic hero who is unaware that he inhabits the world of the grotesque – a Job whose sufferings are unredeemed by the existence of a finally omniscient and loving God.
HISTORICAL:
This approach tries to recapture the play as it seemed to the original audience with their religious, political and social ideas and prejudices. Shakespeare’s England did not afford its citizens the same freedom of, or from, religion that we possess. A few years BEFORE King Lear, the playwright Thomas Kyd had literally been tortured for expressing scepticism about Orthodox Christianity. Shakespeare is saying, as clearly as he can, what many people in his own day must have believed secretly. There is no God. The comforts of religion are make-believe. Nor are we good by nature, or through our laws and customs. The only hope for human beings is that we can try to be decent and generous with one another.
The threat of Civil War raises a point that was important to Shakespeare; the belief in that personal immorality in the ruling class is a disease that spreads evil through society, in extreme cases causing it to fall apart. Britain at large is rescued from the evil that had overrun the highest reaches of its society. Civil War in Britain is avoided and the French invasion caused by Lear’s lack of judgement is defeated by Albany. The play is thus supportive of civil authority; the catastrophe of Lear’s reign might be compared by the 17th century playgoer with the strength and harmony from that of James.
FEMINIST:
Ina feminist reading of the text King Lear becomes an exercise in patriarchy and misogyny. There is an equation within the play between human nature and male power, ie it is the natural state of human beings to have a masculine force fulfilling the key power roles of society. The connection is made between female insubordination and anarchy – women must function within their delineated roles or chaos and tragedy results. The only form of social organization strong enough to hold chaos at bay is the institution of male power and the centre of corruption is female lust.
FREUDIAN:
Freudian interpretation positions the three daughters as symbolic representations of Lear’s own psyche. They represent the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman – the mother who bears him, the companion of his bed and board and his destroyer. Cordelia represents death, as ‘dumbness’ is a familiar representation of death. The final image of the play (Lear carrying the dead Cordelia in his arms) was reversed with the Freudian framework, as Cordelia became the Death Goddess, bearing Lear away, rather than the reverse.
POLITICAL:
Readings have included King Lear (directed by Imse Csisar 1981) as a political parable about the decline of authority in Eastern Europe in the 80’s set in an abandoned factory, the decaying of the building mirrored not only by the decay of Lear and his kingdom but the decay in Eastern Europe. The play becomes a war between capitalist and Marxist ideologies and the driving force in Lear’s downfall industrial greed. The film Ran (directed by Akira Kurosawa 1985) is set in Japanese Gekokujo, a period in early 16th Century when the government had broken down and Japan was ravaged by contending warlords. Kurosawa’s vision of the cyclic nature of human history and the mid-eighties context of widespread warfare and rapidly escalating arms race signified the state of humanity as a ‘confused and lonely state of affairs with evil apparently ascendant and the Buddha and gods ineffectual in the face of human suffering.”
DOMESTIC:
Sir Richard Eyre: “The play is for me unambiguously a domestic play that has the metaphor of the state laid on top of it. Every family is a state in miniature that has a ruler and that’s the patriarchal ruler, the father.
“The Lears are the archetypal dysfunctional family – a widowed father with three daughters – Goneril, the oldest, bullied from birth, Regan the middle child with a kind of manipulative relationship with her father, and Cordelia, the youngest, bestowed with all Lear’s unqualified and unexamined love.
“When a parent is rejected by a child, or when a child is rejected by a parent, it’s the most profound rage and despair that human beings are capable of. The story of King Lear is the education of two tyrannous fathers, Lear and Gloucester. It’s a lesson in how to love your children and it’s the most brutal and painful form of education.”
Last edited: