While often regarded as an Elizabethan playwright, Shakespeare’s career straddled two epochs: the reign of Queen
Elizabeth (1562 to 1603) and the reign of King James (1603 to 1625). While it is notoriously difficult to find details about Shakespeare’s personal life, he taps into what was happening around him in his writing. This was the year in which two of Shakespeare’s best-known plays were crafted: Macbeth and, the subject of this notebook, King Lear.
The latter play tells the story of the titular King Lear, who at the start of the play demands declarations of love from his three daughters (Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia), that he might divide the kingdom among them based on their devotion to him. When Cordelia refuses to rise to her father’s …show more content…
Rejected by his daughters, Lear slowly descends into insanity. Plots and counterplots are exchanged, and by the end of the play Goneril kills both Regan and herself, their scheming leads to Cordelia’s murder, and Lear dies of grief over
Cordelia’s death.
For me the heart of this play is the disintegration of Lear’s family, and the developing antagonism between
Lear and his elder daughters. What fascinates me is the animalistic brutality of these familial relationships, which have degenerated to such a point that Goneril and Regan are willing to murder each other, Cordelia, and their father. While
I want to focus the play around these central relationships, it’s important to note that, in this tragedy, Shakespeare included a parallel plot: the story of Edgar, ‘sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam’ (from the title page of the 1608 quarto of King Lear, quoted in Shapiro, 2015). What’s interesting to me is Shapiro’s interpretation of this subplot as a counterpoint to the story of Lear’s family, “a way to highlight Lear’s figurative blindness by juxtaposing it with something more literal” (Shapiro, 2015). Edgar’s
Elizabeth (1562 to 1603) and the reign of King James (1603 to 1625). While it is notoriously difficult to find details about Shakespeare’s personal life, he taps into what was happening around him in his writing. This was the year in which two of Shakespeare’s best-known plays were crafted: Macbeth and, the subject of this notebook, King Lear.
The latter play tells the story of the titular King Lear, who at the start of the play demands declarations of love from his three daughters (Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia), that he might divide the kingdom among them based on their devotion to him. When Cordelia refuses to rise to her father’s …show more content…
Rejected by his daughters, Lear slowly descends into insanity. Plots and counterplots are exchanged, and by the end of the play Goneril kills both Regan and herself, their scheming leads to Cordelia’s murder, and Lear dies of grief over
Cordelia’s death.
For me the heart of this play is the disintegration of Lear’s family, and the developing antagonism between
Lear and his elder daughters. What fascinates me is the animalistic brutality of these familial relationships, which have degenerated to such a point that Goneril and Regan are willing to murder each other, Cordelia, and their father. While
I want to focus the play around these central relationships, it’s important to note that, in this tragedy, Shakespeare included a parallel plot: the story of Edgar, ‘sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam’ (from the title page of the 1608 quarto of King Lear, quoted in Shapiro, 2015). What’s interesting to me is Shapiro’s interpretation of this subplot as a counterpoint to the story of Lear’s family, “a way to highlight Lear’s figurative blindness by juxtaposing it with something more literal” (Shapiro, 2015). Edgar’s