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Critical essays on King Lear, William Shakespeare

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 1 )

There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope. There is no scene which does not contribute to the aggravation of the distress or conduct of the action, and scarce a line which does not conduce to the progress of the scene. So powerful is the current of the poet’s imagination, that the mind, which once ventures within it, is hurried irresistibly along.

—Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare

For its unsurpassed combination of sheer terrifying force and its existential and cosmic reach, King Lear leads this ranking as drama’s supreme achievement. The notion that King Lear is Shakespeare’s (and by implication drama’s) greatest play is certainly debatable, but consensus in its favor has gradually coalesced over the centuries since its first performance around 1606. During and immediately following William Shakespeare’s lifetime, there is no evidence that King Lear was particularly valued over other of the playwright’s dramas. It was later considered a play in need of an improving makeover. In 1681 poet and dramatist Nahum Tate, calling King Lear “a Heap of Jewels unstrung and unpolish’d,” altered what many Restoration critics and audiences found unbecoming and unbearable in the drama. Tate eliminated the Fool, whose presence was considered too vulgar for a proper tragedy, and gave the play a happy ending, restoring Lear to his throne and arranging the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar, neatly tying together with poetic justice the double strands of Shakespeare’s far bleaker drama. Tate’s bowdlerization of King Lear continued to be presented throughout the 18th century, and the original play was not performed again until 1826. By then the Romantics had reclaimed Shakespeare’s version, and an appreciation of the majesty and profundity of King Lear as Shakespeare’s greatest achievement had begun. Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared the play “the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet”; while Percy Bysshe Shelley considered it “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” John Keats, who described the play as “the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay,” offered King Lear as the best example of the intensity, with its “close relationship with Beauty & Truth,” that is the “Excellence of every Art.” Dissenting voices, however, challenged the supremacy of King Lear . Essayist Charles Lamb judged the play to have “nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting” and deemed it “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.” The great Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley acknowledged King Lear as “Shakespeare’s greatest achievement” but “not his best play.” For Bradley, King Lear , with its immense scope and the variety and intensity of its scenes, is simply “too huge for the stage.” Perhaps the most notorious dissenter against the greatness of King Lear was Leo Tolstoy, who found its fable-like unreality reprehensible and ruled it a “very bad, carelessly composed production” that “cannot evoke amongst us anything but aversion and weariness.” Such qualifications and dismissals began to diminish in light of 20thcentury history. The existential vision of King Lear has seemed even more pertinent and telling as a reflection of the human condition; while modern dramatic artistry with its contrapuntal structure and anti-realistic elements has caught up with Shakespeare’s play. Today King Lear is commonly judged unsurpassed in its dramatization of so many painful but inescapable human and cosmic truths.

King Lear is based on a well-known story from ancient Celtic and British mythology, first given literary form by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1137). Raphael Holinshed later repeated the story of Lear and his daughters in his Chronicles (1587), and Edmund Spenser, the first to name the youngest daughter, presents the story in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1589). A dramatic version— The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonerill, Ragan, and Cordella —appeared around 1594. All these versions record Lear dividing his kingdom, disinheriting his youngest daughter, and being driven out by his two eldest daughters before reuniting with his youngest, who helps restore him to the throne and bring her wicked sisters to justice. Shakespeare is the first to give the story an unhappy ending, to turn it from a sentimental, essentially comic tale in which the good are eventually rewarded and the evil punished into a cosmic tragedy. Other plot elements—Lear’s madness, Cordelia’s hanging, Lear’s death from a broken heart, as well as Kent’s devotion and the role of the Fool—are also Shakespeare’s inventions, as is the addition of the parallel plot of Gloucester and his sons, which Shakespeare adapted from a tale in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia . The play’s double plot in which the central situation of Lear’s suffering and self-knowledge is paralleled and counterpointed in Gloucester’s circumstances makes King Lear different from all the other great tragedies. The effect widens and deepens the play into a universal tragedy of symphonic proportions.

King Lear opens with the tragic turning point in its very first scene. Compared to the long delays in Hamle t and Othello for the decisive tragic blow to fall, King Lear , like Macbeth , shifts its emphasis from cause to consequence. The play foregoes nearly all exposition or character development and immediately presents a show trial with devastating consequences. The aging Lear has decided to divest himself of kingly responsibilities by dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. Although the maps of the divisions are already drawn, Lear stages a contest for his daughters to claim their portion by a public profession of their love. “Tell me, my daughters,” Lear commands, “. . . Which of you shall we say doth love us most.” Lear’s self-indulgence—bargaining power for love—is both a disruption of the political and natural order and an essential human violation in his demanding an accounting of love that defies the means of measuring it. Goneril and Regan, however, vie to outdo the other in fulsome pledges of their love, while Cordelia, the favorite, responds to Lear’s question “what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters” with the devastatingly honest truth: “Nothing,” a word that will reverberate through the entire play. Cordelia forcefully and simply explains that she loves Lear “According to my bond, no more nor less.” Lear is too blind and too needy to appreciate her fidelity or yet understand the nature of love, or the ingenuous flattery of his older daughters. He responds to the hurt he feels by exiling the one who loves him most authentically and deeply. The rest of the play will school Lear in his mistake, teaching him the lesson of humanity that he violates in the play’s opening scene.

The devastating consequences of his decision follow. Lear learns that he cannot give away power and still command allegiance from Goneril or Regan. Their avowals of love quickly turn into disrespect for a now useless and demanding parent. From the opening scene in which Lear appears in all his regal splendor, he will be successively stripped of all that invests a king in majesty and insulates a human being from first-hand knowledge of suffering and core existential truths. Urged to give up 50 of his attending knights by Goneril, Lear claims more gratitude from Regan, who joins her sister in further whittling down Lear’s retinue from 100 knights to 50, to 25, 10, 5, to none, ironically in the language of calculation of the first scene. Lear explodes:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s .

Lear is now readied to face reality as a “poorest thing.” Lear’s betrayal by his daughters is paralleled by the treachery of the earl of Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund, who plots to supplant the legitimate son, Edgar, and eventually claim supremacy over his father. Edmund, one of the most calculating and coldblooded of Shakespeare’s villains, rejects all the bonds of family and morality early on in the play by affirming: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law / My services are bound.” Refusing to accept the values of a society that rejects him as a bastard, Edmund will operate only by the laws of survival of the fittest in a relentless drive for dominance. He convinces Edgar that Gloucester means to kill him, forcing his brother into exile, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam, a mad beggar. In the play’s overwhelming third act—perhaps the most overpowering in all of drama—Edgar encounters Lear, his Fool, and his lone retainer, the disguised Kent, whom Lear had banished in the first scene for challenging Lear’s treatment of Cordelia. The scene is a deserted heath with a fierce storm raging, as Lear, maddened by the treatment of his daughters, rails at his fate in apocalyptic fury:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts, S inge my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder, Strike fl at the thick rotundity o’ th’ world, Crack nature’s mould, all germens spill at once, That makes ingrateful man.

The storm is a brilliant expressionistic projection of Lear’s inner fury, with his language universalizing his private experience in a combat with elemental forces. Beseeching divine justice, Lear is bereft and inconsolable, declaring “My wits begin to turn.” His descent into madness is completed when he meets the disguised Edgar who serves as Lear’s mirror and emblem of humanity as “unaccommodated man”—a “poor, bare, forked animal”:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

Lear’s suffering has led him to compassion and an understanding of the human needs he had formerly ignored. It is one of the rare moments of regenerative hope before the play plunges into further chaos and violence.

Act 3 concludes with what has been called the most horrifying scene in dramatic literature. Gloucester is condemned as a traitor for colluding with Cordelia and the French invasion force. Cornwall, Regan’s husband, orders Gloucester bound and rips out one of his eyes. Urged on by Regan (“One side will mock another; th’ other too”), Cornwall completes Gloucester’s blinding after a protesting servant stabs Cornwall and is slain by Regan. In agony, Gloucester calls out for Edmund as Regan supplies the crushing truth:

Out, treacherous villain! Thou call’st on him that hates thee. It was he That made the overture of thy treasons to us, Who is too good to pity thee.

Oedipus-like, Gloucester, though blind, now sees the truth of Edmund’s villainy and Edgar’s innocence. Thrown out of the castle, he is ordered to “smell / His way to Dover.”

Act 4 arranges reunions and the expectation that the suffering of both Lear and Gloucester will be compensated and villainy purged. Edgar, still posing as Poor Tom, meets his father and agrees to guide him to Dover where the despairing Gloucester intends to kill himself by jumping from its cliffs. On arriving, Edgar convinces his father that he has fallen and survived, and Gloucester accepts his preservation as an act of the gods and vows “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die.” The act concludes with Lear’s being reunited with Cordelia. Awaking in her tent, convinced that he has died, Lear gradually recognizes his daughter and begs her forgiveness as a “very foolish, fond old man.”

The stage is now set in act 5 for a restoration of order and Lear, having achieved the requisite self-knowledge through suffering, but Shakespeare pushes the play beyond the reach of consolation. Although Edmund is bested in combat by his brother, and Regan is poisoned by Goneril before she kills herself, neither poetic nor divine justice prevails. Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner, but their rescue comes too late. As Shakespeare’s stage directions state, “Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms,” and the play concludes with one of the most heart-wrenching scenes and the most overpowering lines in all of drama. Lear, although desperate to believe that his beloved daughter is alive, gradually accepts the awful truth:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all. Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!

Lear dies with this realization of cosmic injustice and indifference, while holding onto the illusion that Cordelia might still survive (“Look on her, look, her lips / Look there, look there!”). The play ends not with the restoration of divine, political, or familial order but in a final nihilistic vision. Shakespeare pushes the usual tragic progression of action leading to suffering and then to self-knowledge to a view into the abyss of life’s purposelessness and cruelty. The best Shakespeare manages to affirm in the face of intractable human evil and cosmic indifference is the heroism of endurance. Urging his despairing father on, Edgar states in the play’s opposition to despair:

. . . Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. Come on.

Ultimately, King Lear , more than any other drama, in my view, allows its audience to test the limits of endurance in the face of mortality and meaninglessness. It has been said that only the greatest art sustains without consoling. There is no better example of this than King Lear .

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

Oxford Lecture King Lear

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King Lear dramatizes the story of an aged king of ancient Britain, whose plan to divide his kingdom among his three daughters ends tragically. When he tests each by asking how much she loves him, the older daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter him. The youngest, Cordelia, does not, and Lear disowns and banishes her. She marries the king of France. Goneril and Regan turn on Lear, leaving him to wander madly in a furious storm.

Meanwhile, the Earl of Gloucester’s illegitimate son Edmund turns Gloucester against his legitimate son, Edgar. Gloucester, appalled at the daughters’ treatment of Lear, gets news that a French army is coming to help Lear. Edmund betrays Gloucester to Regan and her husband, Cornwall, who puts out Gloucester’s eyes and makes Edmund the Earl of Gloucester.

Cordelia and the French army save Lear, but the army is defeated. Edmund imprisons Cordelia and Lear. Edgar then mortally wounds Edmund in a trial by combat. Dying, Edmund confesses that he has ordered the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. Before they can be rescued, Lear brings in Cordelia’s body and then he himself dies.

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A Critical Study of William Shakespeares King Lear: Plot and Structure

International Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

Related Papers

The Journal of International Social Research, Vol. 13, No. 74, pp. 26-32

Kübra Baysal

One of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, King Lear (1608) exhibits how error of judgement, the interference of fate and the presence of evil brings one's downfall. The play presents the tragic hero, Lear, who is in an elevated position in his society as a just king but gradually falls because of erroneous judgement and the evil, which is awakened primarily by his daughters, Regan and Goneril. The effect of providence similarly serves for the rise of the evil in the play. Considering himself too old to rule his country, King Lear makes the decision to divide the realm amongst his daughters, by which he shall measure the extent of their affection towards him as their father. However, unable to judge her daughers' love for him properly, he commits a tragic fault and banishes his most devoted daughter, Cordelia, from his court, which triggers the whole chain of tragic incidents (Richardson, 2008, 6). As a victim to his faulty judgement and the malevolent providence, Lear represents the human condition, love and dignity through his suffering and tragic end. Hence, this paper aims to analyse Shakespeare's King Lear as a tragedy reflecting the profound impact of erroneous judgement and the role of providence in one's life exemplified through King Lear, his daughters and evil characters.

Bilal Hamamra

This article deploys the critical lines of new historicism, feminism and performance studies to argue that Shakespeare's King Lear is a critique of King James I's absolute authority and the destructive ideology of gender difference via the binary opposites of speech and silence. A new historicist reading would argue that the dominant male powers in King Lear eliberately foster the subversive behaviour of others (Cordelia, Regan, Goneril, Edmund) in order to crush it publicly and so assert their dominance. However, in this paper, I argue that King Lear is a trial of language, ending with the renunciation of patriarchal speech and the subordination of male figures to Cordelia's silence. Following materialist feminist criticism, I argue that Regan and Goneril are reproducers of the masculine ideology of power, property and linguistic domination. While Shakespeare criticises male figures' absolute voices that are ventriloquised by Regan, Goneril and Edmund, he represents silence as a subjective space of truth and honesty and a site of rebellion against unjust speech as illuminated in the figure of Cordelia whose silence undermines Lear's game of words.

Jouf University Humanities Journal

YAHYA S . DAHAMI

Abstract The natural and accepted behavior is that a king should behave like a king. In a different way, a fool might show the conduct of a comedian or a silly person, but the notion in Shakespeare’s King Lear can be seen reversing. As a reader of the play, I believe that Lear is a king and should show responsibility and obligation according to his title. It is expected that the Fool behaves with amusing and humorous activities. This study aims to explore the concepts of ‘irrationality’ and its conflicting ‘wisdom’ to illustrate the profound inverted roles of the two major characters ‘Lear and the Fool.’ Through an analytical and critical examination, the study is meant to expose the comic conducts of King Lear and, on the other side, the wisdom sides of the Fool. The paper starts with an introduction about Shakespeare and the sources of the play, then analytically comments, in its first central part, on the behavior of Lear as a comic person mixing hilarity and inconvenient conduct. It is followed by the second central part, which deals with the aspects of wisdom in the behavior of the Fool. Then the paper ends with a concise conclusion. الملخص: السلوك الطبيعي والمقبول هو أن أي الملك يفترض أن يسلك سلوك الملوك وفي المقابل فالمهرج، من الطبيعي أن يظهر من سلوكه نوع من السذاجة والحمق والفكاهة، لكن الفكرة في مسرحية ’الملك لير‘ King Lear لوليام شكسبير معكوسة، كقارئ للمسرحية، أعتقد أن ’لير‘ هو الملك ويفترض أن يتصرف كملك يتمثل المسئولية والواجب وفقاً لمنصبه، من المتوقع أن يكون سلوك المهرج ينم عن أنشطة فكاهية ومسلية. تهدف هذه الدراسة، في محاولة، لسبر غور مفهوم ’انعدام العقلانية‘ ومقابلها ’الحكمة‘ من أجل إظهار الأدوار العميقة المقلوبة للشخصيتين الرئيسيتين ’لير‘ و’المهرج‘؛ يُعنى بالدراسة إيضاح السلوك الهزلي الفكاهي في شخصية الملك ’لير‘ وفي المقابل إبراز السلوك الحكيم والمتبصر لدى شخصية ’المهرج‘ من خلال إتباع المنهج التحليلي الناقد.

Haytham Kawash

Abstract: This paper is going to talk about the influence of wealth, money, and its circulation as well as transactions on two of Shakespeare’s plays namely The Merchant of Venice and King Lear from a cultural point of view. In fact the effect of economics is more evident in the former than the latter, however, upon analyzing the tragedy the reader, researcher, and critic would be overwhelmed by the profusion of mercantile terms in it. This financial treatment of the aforementioned plays is opposed to the long-established philosophical study of them. Thus, the investigation of this paper will not be restricted to the theoretical sphere of literary criticism, but it will go beyond it to the real-life monetary one. Accordingly, the research will show the influence of economics on the aforementioned plays regarding the 1) Elizabethan audiences of the plays, 2) development of their dramatis personae, 3) their destinies, and 4) themes tackled by the Bard. The importance of the topic lies in its being an unexhausted critical area. The philosophical, religious, psychoanalytic, and formalist readings of Shakespeare have been always emphasized at the expense of the down-to-earth economic reading. This paper will track the two plays ‘economically’ from the moment of their writing till their realizations on stage or in print. The research will synthesize most of the financial facets already discussed by critics on this matter to come up with yet another reason arguing whether Shakespeare is still our contemporary on the economic level. It is noteworthy to indicate that even the obligations of human relationships in the Shakespeare’s two aforementioned plays are not free and followed for their own sake, but they abide by the predominant mercantile mentality of the Elizabethan age. In a nut shell, the paper will argue that although Shakespeare philosophizes The Merchant of Venice and King Lear, his distinctive treatment of money and wealth in these two plays affect the unfolding of their plots and characterizations. Consequently, not only does Shakespeare integrate the abstract metaphysical language into these two plays, but he also sets the economic dynamics to act on them. To emphasize, the thesis is going to address this topic from the perspective of cultural studies. The two types of cultural studies that the research will apply are the British cultural materialism and new historicism for their relevancy to the historical, cultural as well as economic contexts of the two plays. These two types will address the characterizations, plots, and diction of the plays. Accordingly, the visionary window of the study will be open on the argument that modern, globalized, and capitalist societies --regardless of all the class, economic, and ideological differences-- can still benefit from the Shakespearean dramatic legacy especially the works that address the financial sphere and its interplay with the spheres of human relationships, justice, politics, and cultural awareness.

Critical Survey

Roger Stritmatter, PhD

Gary Taylor's 1982 Review of English Studies article, 'A New Source and an Old Date for King Lear', highlights numerous semantic, thematic and structural parallels between Shakespeare's King Lear, customarily assigned a composition date in late 1605 or spring 1606, and Eastward Ho (first published September 1605). Deconstructing Taylor's methodology for determining the order of influence between the two plays, we argue that the authors of Eastward Ho found the bard's cosmic tragedy of royal intrigue and inter-generational strife an irresistible target for rambunctious topical satire. In place of a Lear that without motive incorporates vague patches of Eastward Ho influence, we read an Eastward Ho that enacts an acerbically brilliant parody of several Shakespeare plays, among them King Lear.

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT)

The present article sought to provide a comparison between The Sophoclean Trilogy and King Lear, respectively produced by Sophocles in the 5th century BC Greece and by William Shakespeare in 1606 at the end of the Elizabethan era in Britain. The comparison was set to investigate the two playwrights' adherence to the production of a good tragedy such as the one Aristotle described in his Poetics. Another attempt was to explain how tragedy evolved during Elizabethan times and measure the extent of deviation both from Aristotle's and Sophocles' conception of some essential tragic factors relating mostly to the hero's hamartia and fall, learning and recognition, fate and free will, retribution and redemption, in addition to diction and style. As the comparison showed, some changes were, indeed, made in the tragedy of King Lear, namely at the level of form, including, among others, the division of the play into separate Acts and Scenes, the breaking of the unity of Action, the increase of the number of characters, etc. At the level of content, the changes appear to have equally touched some important issues, namely the role of fate and prophecies, the characters' flaws, in addition to the nature of the relation between family members, to mention but a few changes. At a deeper level, however, Shakespeare's tragedy mostly remained faithful to its classical heritage, namely through the punishment of the bad and the gratifying of the good. The gods were always omnipresent and ready to reestablish the status quo, restore justice and bring back prosperity and peace, though sometimes in an incomprehensible way, especially when their action was coupled with fate and bad fortune.

Jakub Svoboda

Ahmed Ghazi

In undertaking a psychoanalytical approach to King Lear, this paper treads in the footsteps of Freud in his 'The Theme of the Three Caskets.' Clearly early Jacobean society was very different from our own; expectations of patriarchy and the place of daughters was only partly covered by the image of the now dead Virgin Queen Elizabeth. One theory alone will not be enough to explain the complexities of the text and modern ideas such as historicism and feminism are also shown to bring new insights, even though they are insights the playwright themselves may not have understood.

Adrian Papahagi

The present paper explores the philosophical and structural importance of “nothing” in King Lear. Stripped of crown, country, kin and majesty, and eventually deprived of human aspect and reason, Lear learns to “make use of nothing”. Lear’s kenosis leads to anagnorisis, namely to the acceptance of his folly, and to the discovery that man is “no more than this”. The numerous occurrences of “nothing” are analysed from several perspectives, including textual criticism. After the examination of First Quarto (Q1) and First Folio (F1) variants in relevant passages, the author suggests that F1 is not Shakespeare’s revision of Q1; indeed, both versions present corrupt readings of the original.

Elliot Weeks

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