89149
Description
Mind Map by Felicity Baines, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Felicity Baines
over 11 years ago
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KING LEAR
- APPEARANCE/ REALITY
- 'I cannot heave / My heart into my
mouth: I love your majesty / According
to my bond; no more, no less'
- 'The art of our necessities is strange, /
That can make vile things precious'
- 'Filth savour by themselves / Humanity
must perforce prey on itself / Like
monsters in the deep'
- 'Yet Edmund was beloved'
- 'I love you more than word can
weild the matter... no less than life'
- ‘Goneril participates in the ceremony brilliantly… Lear is calling more for ‘word’ than
‘matter’… Regan can only echo Goneril and Cordelia commits herself to matter rather
than to words… to a plain rhetoric of concrete enumeration, rather than to ceremonial
rhetoric of comparatives and superlative’ – Richard Strier
- ‘Goneril participates in the ceremony brilliantly… Lear is calling more for ‘word’ than
‘matter’… Regan can only echo Goneril and Cordelia commits herself to matter rather
than to words… to a plain rhetoric of concrete enumeration, rather than to ceremonial
rhetoric of comparatives and superlative’ – Richard Strier
- 'I cannot heave / My heart into my
mouth: I love your majesty / According
to my bond; no more, no less'
- JUSTICE
- ‘I am a man / More
sinned against than
sinning’
- ‘there is infact a poetic justice
in King Lear… evil is
destroyed’ – C.L. Sissil
- ‘there is infact a poetic justice
in King Lear… evil is
destroyed’ – C.L. Sissil
- ‘And worse I may be yet; the
worst is not / So long as we
can say ‘this is the worst!’
- Cordelia’s death ‘violates our expectations’
- Cordelia’s death ‘violates our expectations’
- ‘I’ll bear / Affliction till it
do cry out itself’
- ‘Thou shalt not die; /
die for adultery! / Lot
copulation thrive’
- ‘we sympathise with Edmund’s
sense of injustice’ – Susan Bruce
- ‘we sympathise with Edmund’s
sense of injustice’ – Susan Bruce
- ‘I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire,
that mine own tears / Do scald like
molten lead’
- ‘He [the Fool] rejects all appearances,
of law, justice, moral order. He sees
brute force, cruelty and lust. He has
no illusions and does not seek
consolation in the existence of natural
or supernatural order, which provides
the punishment of evil and the reward
of good’ – Jan Knott
- ‘He [the Fool] rejects all appearances,
of law, justice, moral order. He sees
brute force, cruelty and lust. He has
no illusions and does not seek
consolation in the existence of natural
or supernatural order, which provides
the punishment of evil and the reward
of good’ – Jan Knott
- ‘The gods are just, and of our
pleasant vices / Make
instruments to plague us: / The
dark and vicious place where you
he got / Cost him his eyes’
- ‘Shakespeare gives us a play in which no
justice is possible in the world as it is, in
which there is so much injustice that the
world may be about to end’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘the principle characters’ in the play being
‘not those who act, but those who suffer’ –
August Wilhelm Schlegel
- ‘Shakespeare gives us a play in which no
justice is possible in the world as it is, in
which there is so much injustice that the
world may be about to end’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘The wheel is
come full circle; I
am here’
- The Royal Shakespeare company showed
the prayers on stage being acted out for the
final seconds with them kneeling and
holding their arms in the air for a short
period of time. This make Lear’s carrying of
the dead Cordelia more profound.
- The Royal Shakespeare company showed
the prayers on stage being acted out for the
final seconds with them kneeling and
holding their arms in the air for a short
period of time. This make Lear’s carrying of
the dead Cordelia more profound.
- ‘This judgement of the heavens,
that makes us tremble, / Touches
us not with pity’
- ‘the Gods are
conspicuous in their
absence’ – Alexander
Leggatt
- Cordelia’s death is ‘a
solemnity in the mystery we
cannot fathom’ – A.C. Bradley
- ‘the Gods are
conspicuous in their
absence’ – Alexander
Leggatt
- ‘The gods defend her!’
- ‘Not about suffering, purgation,
spiritual development’ – John
Dullmore
- ‘Not about suffering, purgation,
spiritual development’ – John
Dullmore
- ‘He hates him / That would
upon the rack of this tough
world / Stretch him out longer’
- ‘Like Lear, Gloucester has to undergo intense
suffering before he can identify with the deprived…
the limitation of a society that depends on empathy
alone for its justice’ – Jonathan Dollimore
- ‘Like Lear, Gloucester has to undergo intense
suffering before he can identify with the deprived…
the limitation of a society that depends on empathy
alone for its justice’ – Jonathan Dollimore
- ‘The gods... have
preserved thee’
- ‘it’s no surprise that in this play Shakespeare
doesn’t define exactly who the god or gods really
are’ – Trevor Nunn
- ‘it’s no surprise that in this play Shakespeare
doesn’t define exactly who the god or gods really
are’ – Trevor Nunn
- ‘I am a man / More
sinned against than
sinning’
- COMPASSION /
RECONSILIATION
- ‘No cause, no cause’
- ‘So young and so
untender!’ ‘So young
my Lord, and true.’
- ‘here I stand your slave / A poor, infirm,
weak and despised old man’
- This line offers ‘utter
affirmation that there
is neither acceptance
that humanity is
corrupt and
destructive’ –
Alexander Leggatt
- This line offers ‘utter
affirmation that there
is neither acceptance
that humanity is
corrupt and
destructive’ –
Alexander Leggatt
- ‘I have one part in my heart
that’s sorry yet for thee’
- ‘The world remains that
is was, a merciless,
heartbreaking world.
Lear is broken by it but
he is learned to love and
be loved’ – Walter Stein.
- ‘The world remains that
is was, a merciless,
heartbreaking world.
Lear is broken by it but
he is learned to love and
be loved’ – Walter Stein.
- ‘My tears begin to take his part so
much / They’ll mar my counterfeiting’
- ‘Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, /
The gods themselves throw incense’
- ‘his flawed heart / Alack! Too weak for the
conflict to support; / Twixt two extremes of
passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly’
- ‘The weight of this sad time
we must obey / Speak what
we feel, not what we ought
to say’
- Lear, ‘feels compassion, acknowledges his own
failures, and lessens himself in terms of divine
justice; like Gloucester, he has come to a new
insight’ – Robert Bechtold Heilman.
- Nahum Tate changed the ending as it
was too pessimistic, perhaps because
there was no reconciliation.
- Lear, ‘feels compassion, acknowledges his own
failures, and lessens himself in terms of divine
justice; like Gloucester, he has come to a new
insight’ – Robert Bechtold Heilman.
- Cordelia calls on ‘unpublish virtues
of the earth’ to restore Lear
- ‘It has no moral lesson, its ending is patently
not inevitable and even if Lear had a tragic
flaw, his suffering is so much out of proportion
to his flaw that it is patently absurd to suggest
that he has merely brought it on himself’ –
Fintan O’Toole
- ‘pyrrhic victory over evil’ -
Kiernan Ryan
- ‘It has no moral lesson, its ending is patently
not inevitable and even if Lear had a tragic
flaw, his suffering is so much out of proportion
to his flaw that it is patently absurd to suggest
that he has merely brought it on himself’ –
Fintan O’Toole
- ‘No cause, no cause’
- THE
NATURAL
ORDER
- ‘Nothing will come
of nothing’
- ‘we shall retain / The name
and all th’additon to a king’
- ‘Edmund rages here against the aristocratic
law of primogeniture’ – Susan Bruce
- ‘Edmund rages here against the aristocratic
law of primogeniture’ – Susan Bruce
- ‘She is herself
a dowry’
- ‘Who still would manage those
authorities / That he hath given
away. Now by my life’
- ‘All other titles thou hast
given away’
- ‘Lear breaks the bond of family and in doing
he unleashes a breakdown in the basic
categories of father and daughter, parent and
child, man and woman’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘Lear breaks the bond of family and in doing
he unleashes a breakdown in the basic
categories of father and daughter, parent and
child, man and woman’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘Thou hast pared
thy wit o’ both sides
and left nothing i’
the middle’
- ‘The younger rises
when the old doth fall’
- ‘To be worst, / The lowest and most
dejected thing of fortune / Stands still in
esperance, lives not in fear’
- ‘Kent’s rudeness is chosen, under pressure,
as a moral stance’ – Richard Strier
- Edmund shows ‘a perfect summation of the new
individualism, the new determinism bound by the rule of
custom which Edmund sees as a ‘plague’ and on which
Cordelia bases her whole sense of herself, as a subject,
a daughter and a wife’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘Kent’s rudeness is chosen, under pressure,
as a moral stance’ – Richard Strier
- ‘Our means secure
us, and our mere
defects’
- Edmund ‘appeals to a meritocratic ideal. He
maintains he is as worthy in himself as anyone born
into privilege and that rewards should not follow the
structure of deeply hierarchical society order, but go
instead to those who merit them’ – Susan Bruce
- Edmund ‘appeals to a meritocratic ideal. He
maintains he is as worthy in himself as anyone born
into privilege and that rewards should not follow the
structure of deeply hierarchical society order, but go
instead to those who merit them’ – Susan Bruce
- ‘The stars above us
govern our conditions’
- ‘In this parochial world, masculine identity
depends on repressing the vulnerability,
dependency and capacity for feeling which
are called ‘feminine’.’ - Coppélia Kahn
- ‘In this parochial world, masculine identity
depends on repressing the vulnerability,
dependency and capacity for feeling which
are called ‘feminine’.’ - Coppélia Kahn
- ‘So horrid as in
woman’
- ‘There’s hell, there’s
darkness, there is the
sulphurous pit!’
- ‘Let me wipe it first, it
smells of mortality’
- ‘If there were two
opposing views of the
world that are tearing
the universe apart, it is
in King Lear’ – Fintan
O’Toole
- ‘The disadvantages suffered
by bastard who survives as
object lessons were similar to
those endured by women’ –
Alison Findlay
- ‘If there were two
opposing views of the
world that are tearing
the universe apart, it is
in King Lear’ – Fintan
O’Toole
- ‘unaccommodated man is no
more than a forked animal’
- ‘battle between order and power,
between feudal system and individual will’
– Fintan O’Toole
- ‘battle between order and power,
between feudal system and individual will’
– Fintan O’Toole
- ‘A credulous father
of a bother noble,
whom nature is farm
from doing harm’
- Cordelia sows ‘the seeds of her own destruction in her
foolish refusal to play the game. But the fact is that
Cordelia cannot join in the game if inflated language, for
the very terms of that language, the whole notion of a
comparison of things, is out of her way of thinking’ –
Fintan O’Toole
- Cordelia sows ‘the seeds of her own destruction in her
foolish refusal to play the game. But the fact is that
Cordelia cannot join in the game if inflated language, for
the very terms of that language, the whole notion of a
comparison of things, is out of her way of thinking’ –
Fintan O’Toole
- ‘Edmund the base shall
top the legitimate’
- ‘Bastards are evil in
Renaissance drama,
because, being on the
margins of the aristocracy,
half connected with it, half a
product of another world, they
have a clear motive to contest
the dominant (or ‘hegemonic’)
ideology, which defends a
particular, aristocratic, mode
of property inheritance’
- ‘Bastards are evil in
Renaissance drama,
because, being on the
margins of the aristocracy,
half connected with it, half a
product of another world, they
have a clear motive to contest
the dominant (or ‘hegemonic’)
ideology, which defends a
particular, aristocratic, mode
of property inheritance’
- ‘legitimate Edgar I shall
have your land’
- ‘a play about power, property and
inheritance… the awful truth that these two
things [power and property] are somehow
prior to the laws of human kindness and not
vice-versa’ – Jonathan Dollimore
- ‘a play about power, property and
inheritance… the awful truth that these two
things [power and property] are somehow
prior to the laws of human kindness and not
vice-versa’ – Jonathan Dollimore
- ‘who in the lusty stealth of
nature take / More composition
and fierce quality / Than doth
within a dull stale bed’
- ‘Goneril and Regan are mouthpieces for duty’ – Richard Strier
- ‘The disadvantages suffered by
bastard who survives as object
lessons were similar to those
endured by women’ – Alison
Findlay
- ‘Goneril and Regan are mouthpieces for duty’ – Richard Strier
- ‘let me, if
not by birth,
have lands
by wit’
- Edmund is ‘a blunt moralist,
ruthlessly exposing the
vices and follies of mankind’
and yet ‘He participates in
the viciousness and
self-seeking of the world he
rails against’ – David Gunby
- Edmund is ‘a blunt moralist,
ruthlessly exposing the
vices and follies of mankind’
and yet ‘He participates in
the viciousness and
self-seeking of the world he
rails against’ – David Gunby
- ‘Nothing will come
of nothing’
- NATURE
- ‘Thou nature, art
my goddess’
- ‘what is most striking about his Lear [Ian McKellen’s], is
its pilgrim’s progress, is its curiosity. McKellen’s Lear is a
man who is always asking questions. The big conundrum,
which he delivers with racking slowness, is: ‘Is there any
cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ And it is
his uncertainty as to the answer that touches one’s own
heart… By the end, you feel this is a Lear who has
somehow undergone a religious moral education.’ –
Michael Billington.
- ‘what is most striking about his Lear [Ian McKellen’s], is
its pilgrim’s progress, is its curiosity. McKellen’s Lear is a
man who is always asking questions. The big conundrum,
which he delivers with racking slowness, is: ‘Is there any
cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ And it is
his uncertainty as to the answer that touches one’s own
heart… By the end, you feel this is a Lear who has
somehow undergone a religious moral education.’ –
Michael Billington.
- ‘Blow, winds,
and crack your
cheeks! rage!
blow!’
- ‘those who have survived – Edgar, Albany and
Kent – are, as Lear has been, just ruin’d pieces
of nature’ – Jon Knott
- ‘those who have survived – Edgar, Albany and
Kent – are, as Lear has been, just ruin’d pieces
of nature’ – Jon Knott
- ‘Crack Nature’s moulds, all germans
spill at once, / That makes ungrateful
man’
- ‘Edmund may appeal to nature as a
goddess who will liberate him from the
restraints and custom and or the moral
order’ – Robert E. Fitch
- ‘Edmund may appeal to nature as a
goddess who will liberate him from the
restraints and custom and or the moral
order’ – Robert E. Fitch
- ‘The tempest in my
mind / Doth my senses
take all feeling else /
Save what beats there’
- ‘First Edmund invokes nature as his
goddess, a goddess who despises such
human, such contrivances as primogeniture’
– Frank Kermode
- ‘First Edmund invokes nature as his
goddess, a goddess who despises such
human, such contrivances as primogeniture’
– Frank Kermode
- ‘the king falls from the
bias of nature’
- ‘We make guilty o four disasters the sun,
the moon, the stars: villains, fools, knaves,
thieves, adulterers, drunkards, liars by
‘spherical predominance’... enforced
obedience of planetary influence...
‘heavenly compulsion’
- This theme recurs ‘again and
again with every shade of
meaning and misunderstanding’
- This theme recurs ‘again and
again with every shade of
meaning and misunderstanding’
- ‘Divisions in state,
unnaturalness between
child and parent’
- ‘pitiless
storm’
- ‘the gods reward
your kindness’
- ‘the animal imagery in King Lear is always
used in derogatory terms to indicate the
unnaturalness of the characters behaviour in
comparison to how they should behave’ –
Sarah Doncaster
- ‘the animal imagery in King Lear is always
used in derogatory terms to indicate the
unnaturalness of the characters behaviour in
comparison to how they should behave’ –
Sarah Doncaster
- ‘what breeds about her heart. Is
there any cause in nature that
makes these hard hearts’
- ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the
gods / They kill us for their sport’
- ‘wolfish visage’
- ‘The theme of King Lear
is the decay and fall of
the world’ – Jan Knott
- ‘The theme of King Lear
is the decay and fall of
the world’ – Jan Knott
- ‘tigers not daughters’
- Lear finds that his ‘frame of
nature’ has been wretched ‘from
the fixed place’
- ‘a wretch whom nature is
ashamed’
- ‘Thou nature, art
my goddess’
- BLINDNESS
- ‘All that follow their
noses are led by their
eyes but blind men’
- ‘I have no way, and
therefore want no eyes’
- ‘What, art mad? A man may
see how the world goes with
no eyes. Look with thine ears’
- ‘Get thee glass eyes / And, like
a scurvy politician, seem / To
see things thou dost not’
- 47 references to eyes in the play
- 47 references to eyes in the play
- ‘Out of my
sight!’ ‘See
better Lear’
- ‘O fond eyes / Beweep this cause
again, I’ll pluck you out’
- All is ‘dark and comfortless’
- All is ‘dark and comfortless’
- ‘Pluck out his poor old eyes’
- ‘Out, vile jelly... let him
smell / His way to Dover’
- ‘Lear, blinded by his obsession with the quantity of
things, decides it must be nothing’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘Lear, blinded by his obsession with the quantity of
things, decides it must be nothing’ – Fintan O’Toole
- ‘I remember thine eyes
well enough’
- ‘The dark and vicious
place where they got /
Cost him his eyes’
- ‘the youngest daughter
does not love thee least’
- ‘dost thou call me a fool
boy?’ ‘All thy other titles thou
has given away’
- ‘Look with thy ears’
- ‘darker purpose’
- ‘the truth, blank
of thine eye’
- Some Elizabethans thought that blinding was
a good punishment for some crimes.
- Some Elizabethans thought that blinding was
a good punishment for some crimes.
- ‘out of my sight’
- ‘Tis the times
plague when
madmen lead
the blind’
- ‘All that follow their
noses are led by their
eyes but blind men’
- PARENT / CHILD
RELATIONSHIPS
- ‘In gratitude, thou marble-hearted
fiend, / More hideous when thou
show’st thee in a child / Than the
sea monster’
- ‘Create her child of spleen, that it may live /
And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her... that
she may feel / How sharper than the serpent’s
tooth it is / To have a thankless child!’
- ‘I pray thee, daughter, do not make me mad’
- ‘But I shall see / The winged
vengeance overtake such children’
- The opening of the play uses ‘the voice of a man
who is used to having his own words create reality’
– Alexander Leggatt
- The opening of the play uses ‘the voice of a man
who is used to having his own words create reality’
– Alexander Leggatt
- ‘Which one of you shall we say doth love us most?’
- ‘I have often blushed to
acknowledge him’
- The play shows ‘the failure of a father’s
power to command the love in a patriarchal
world and the emotional penalty he pays
for wielding power – Coppélia Kahn
- The play shows ‘the failure of a father’s
power to command the love in a patriarchal
world and the emotional penalty he pays
for wielding power – Coppélia Kahn
- ‘there was good sport at his making
and the whoreson must be
acknowledged.’
- ‘Here I disclaim my paternal care’
- ‘her price has fallen’
- ‘Better thou / Had’st not
been born than not to have
pleased me better’
- ‘he always loved our sister most’
- ‘Why bastard? Wherefore base? / When my
dimensions are as well compact, / My mind
as generous, and my shape as true / As
honest madam’s issue? / Why brand they us /
With base? With baseness? bastardy? base,
base?’
- Of the modern 2012 version by
Michael Attenborough featuring subtle
hints at sexual abuse of Goneril and
Regan produced a Lear that ‘one
understands rather than sympathises
with’ - Michael Billington
- Of the modern 2012 version by
Michael Attenborough featuring subtle
hints at sexual abuse of Goneril and
Regan produced a Lear that ‘one
understands rather than sympathises
with’ - Michael Billington
- ‘there’s son against father: the king
falls from the bias of nature; there’s
father against child’
- ‘If Lear is intemperate and rash, Gloucester is gullible and
obtuse in his dealings with his sons’ – Jay L. Halio
- ‘If Lear is intemperate and rash, Gloucester is gullible and
obtuse in his dealings with his sons’ – Jay L. Halio
- ‘Divisions in state, unnaturalness
between child and parent’
- ‘Gloucester apparently does not know either of his sons very well, and the
bond between them could not be easily taken in. But it is also the victim of
an anxiety that will not let him rest in uncertainty’ – Jay L. Halio
- ‘Gloucester apparently does not know either of his sons very well, and the
bond between them could not be easily taken in. But it is also the victim of
an anxiety that will not let him rest in uncertainty’ – Jay L. Halio
- ‘Into her womb convey sterility!’
- ‘You heaven – if it be you that
stir these daughters’ hearts’
- ‘No, you unnatural hags, / I will
have such revenges on you
both / That all the world shall –
I will do such things – / What
they are, I know not – but they
shall be / The terrors of the
earth... No, I’ll not weep’
- ‘How dost my boy?’
- ‘When we our betters see bearing our
woes / We scarcely think our miseries
foes. / he childed as I father’d’
- ‘I gave you all, made you my guardian’
- ‘I did her wrong’
- ‘in my corrupted blood’
- ‘a disease that’s in my flesh’
- ‘the younger rises when the old doth fall’
- ‘Thou hast power to shake my manhood’
- ‘In gratitude, thou marble-hearted
fiend, / More hideous when thou
show’st thee in a child / Than the
sea monster’
- CLOTHING /
NAKEDNESS
- ‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er
you are, / That bide the pelting of
this pitiless storm’
- ‘Let’s not the creaking of
shoes nor the rusting of
the silks betray thy poor
heart to woman’
- ‘You, sir – I entertain you for one
of my hundred; only I do not like
the fashion of your garments’
- ‘And bring some covering
for this naked soul’
- ‘Robes and furr’d
gowns hide all’
- ‘Is man no more than this?
Consider him well. Thou
owest the worm no silk, the
beast no hid, the sheep no
wool, the cat no perfume...
thou art the thing itself;
unaccommodated man is no
more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art. Off,
off you lendings! Come,
unbutton here’
- ‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er
you are, / That bide the pelting of
this pitiless storm’
- BETRAYAL
- ‘In palaces, treason; and
the bond crack’d ‘twist
son and father’
- ‘Machinations, hollowness,
treachery, and all ruinous disorders
follow us disquietly to our graves’
- ‘The whole character [Edmund], its carless,
light-hearted villainy, contrasted with the
sullen, rancorous malignity of Regan and
Goneril’
- ‘The whole character [Edmund], its carless,
light-hearted villainy, contrasted with the
sullen, rancorous malignity of Regan and
Goneril’
- ‘If it be you that stirs these
daughters’ hearts / Against
their fathers, fool me not so
much / To bear it tamely’
- ‘Of Gloucester’s
treachery / And of the
loyal service of his son’
- ‘Edmund, I arrest tee / On
capital treason; and, in thine
attaint / This gilded serpent’
- ‘If none appear to prove
upon thy person / Thy
heinous, manifest and
many treasons’
- ‘In palaces, treason; and
the bond crack’d ‘twist
son and father’
- MADNESS
- ‘O, let not be mad, not mad,
sweet heaven! Keep me in
temper; I would not be mad!’
- ‘Lear’s death resists analysis resists
language’ – Alexander Leggatt
- ‘There is no scene which does not contribute to
the aggravation of the distress of conduct of the
action, and scarce a line which does no conduce
to the progress of the scene’ – Samuel Johnson
- ‘Lear’s death resists analysis resists
language’ – Alexander Leggatt
- ‘I prithee,
daughter, do not
make me mad’
- ‘O fool, I shall go mad’
- ‘Enter Edgar
disguised as a
madman’
- ‘Thou say’st the King grows
mad: I’ll tell thee, friend, / I am
almost mad myself’
- ‘Lear’s mind, like the play itself is constantly on the
move, in a dynamic pattern of advance and retreat,
surrender and resistance’ – Alexander Leggatt
- ‘Lear’s mind, like the play itself is constantly on the
move, in a dynamic pattern of advance and retreat,
surrender and resistance’ – Alexander Leggatt
- ‘Tis the time’s plague
when madmen lead
the blind’
- ‘identity is socially constructed’
– Alexander Leggatt
- The storm scene is ‘part of the tormented
consciousness of Lear’ and is pathetic
fallacy and projection of his madness.
- ‘identity is socially constructed’
– Alexander Leggatt
- ‘O, matter and
impertinency mix’d! /
Reason, in madness’
- ‘You see how full of
change his age is;
the observation we
have made of it hath
not been little’
- ‘Lear simply refuses to
believe what his eyes, and
ours, see all too plainly’ –
Alexander Leggatt
- Play is a ‘series of colliding
images’ – Alexander Leggatt
- ‘Lear simply refuses to
believe what his eyes, and
ours, see all too plainly’ –
Alexander Leggatt
- ‘Tis the infirmity of his age;
yet he hath ever but
slenderly known himself’
- ‘Idle old man / Who still would manage those
authorities / That he hath given away. Now by
my life / Old fools are become babes again’
- ‘the Fool does not desert his ridiculous degraded
king, but follows him into madness. The Fool
knows that the only true madness is to regard this
world as rational’ – Jan Kott
- ‘the Fool does not desert his ridiculous degraded
king, but follows him into madness. The Fool
knows that the only true madness is to regard this
world as rational’ – Jan Kott
- ‘Who is it that can tell me
who I am?’ ‘Lear’s shadow’
- ‘even his most positive
insight as the play’s ultimate
statements’ – S.L. Goldburg
- ‘even his most positive
insight as the play’s ultimate
statements’ – S.L. Goldburg
- ‘Thou shouldst not have been
old before thou hadst been wise’
- ‘It is the slow oily politeness of
Goneril that drives him frantic’ –
Alexander Leggatt
- ‘It is the slow oily politeness of
Goneril that drives him frantic’ –
Alexander Leggatt
- ‘Sir, you are old... You
should be ruled and lead’
- ‘My wits begin to turn’
- ‘O! Matter and impertinency
mixed! Reason in madness!’
- Gloucester’s story paralleling Lear’s,
‘we realise that the blind man saw the
truth after all’ – Alexander Leggatt
- Jacobean’s and Elizabethan’s visited Bedlam as
entertainment so Shakespeare could have added
Edgar’s feigned madness as comic relief from the
truly mad Lear.
- Gloucester’s story paralleling Lear’s,
‘we realise that the blind man saw the
truth after all’ – Alexander Leggatt
- ‘I fear I am not in my
perfect mind’
- ‘in ill thoughts again’
- ‘the grief hath
crazed my
wits’
- He ‘relates the
storm to his own
plight’ –
Alexander
Leggatt
- He ‘relates the
storm to his own
plight’ –
Alexander
Leggatt
- ‘There’s a tempest in my mind’
- ‘O, let not be mad, not mad,
sweet heaven! Keep me in
temper; I would not be mad!’
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