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March 29, 2024, 01:34:34 pm

Author Topic: King Lear  (Read 2530 times)  Share 

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amycourty

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King Lear
« on: November 02, 2008, 12:08:58 pm »
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hello.
if anyone has any spare time is anyone happy to critique my lear prac essay.  . it took me a little over an hour... am just gradually decreasing time..
Um the extracts were.. hmm . from the 2006 exam,.
1.
EDMUND
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit

2. LEAR Arraign her first. ’Tis Gonerill! I here take my oath
before this honourable assembly she kicked the poor King
her father.
FOOL Come hither, mistress. Is your name Gonerill?
LEAR She cannot deny it.
FOOL Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool.
LEAR
And here’s another whose warped looks proclaim
What store her heart is made on. Stop her there!
Arms, arms, sword, fi re! Corruption in the place!
False justicer, why hast thou let her ’scape?
etc.

3,
GLOUCESTER O, let me kiss that hand!
LEAR Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
GLOUCESTER
O ruined piece of nature! This great world
Shall so wear out to naught. Dost thou know me?
etc



this is what i did.

It is a dark and bleak world which Shakespeare exposes in the tragedy that is King Lear.  The audience is plunged into an upside down moral universe, a place where the “glib and oily”, the dishonest, wicked and pure evil thrive.  Those few characters who do possess virtue and goodness, it seems, are punished for just those qualities and are exiled or forced to hide their natures.  The combined effect of human evil and the random cruelty of fate outweigh any virtue in the world.  It is only once characters have been betrayed, exploited and put at the bottom of fortune’s wheel that the characters acknowledge that “the stars above govern our condition” and that man has no power over the vicious and almighty power of the gods or fate.
In the moments leading up to Lear’s tragic mistake Lear is seen as a commanding and demanding, regal and majestic king, engulfed by his own arrogant pride.  There is a ringing tone of voice in his first speech, the tone of a voice that is accustomed to command.  The odd irony is that this tone is balanced against the irresponsibility or ‘unkingliness’ of what he’s doing.  By wishing to “crawl unburdened toward death” and freeing himself from any kingly responsibilities, Lear already challenges fate.  “This coronet part between you”- Lear parts the tangible and solid crown.  The fool later parodies the sheer madness exhibited by the king by demonstrating the great uses of two crowns of a split egg- in essence, demonstrating that splitting the egg, or kingdom, will leave “nothing” for anyone.  Lear, very early on in the play, further displays his arrogant and irrational pride by banishing his loyal servant Kent and his “joy” Cordelia, effectively furthering his rashness when “majesty stoops to folly” and challenges nature and patriarchy.
The self-proclaimed child of nature, Edmond, too challenges patriarchy, yet toward the naive and at times over-trusting Gloucester.  Both men are brought into the heart of furious nature, who “spits... spouts... cracks... and blows.”  In the storm scenes Shakespeare’s language creates images of the “unnatural” disturbance in the world, as well as in Lear’s mind.  Similarly throughout the play, Shakespeare refers to the wicked “wolfish... pelican... dog-hearted” children, with animals suggesting the predatory aspect of the amoral characters, who continue to “grow and prosper”.  The unnatural is a recurring theme and thread in the language, the “bias of nature”, the child against parent, the intense hypocrisy and greed is summed up by the pattern of animal-like, monstrous images.  Yet the play is insistent on the basic, “poor, bare” status of humanity – however this is balanced in the play’s language against the unnatural, the horrible.
In the second extract, Lear’s pathetic spectacle as an imagined judge challenges the unnatural.  Lear proclaims to the “honourable assembly” – Edgar disguised as Poor Tom and the Fool – the the “savage” Gonerill “kicked the poor king her father.”  In hearing the pathetic and dismal parody that is taking place, pathos is felt for Lear who is compared to the honourable, powerful and majestic man he once was.  This scene exhibits his powerlessness in a world where all he can see is corruption.  The “rascal beadle... the userer... scurvy politician” are all corrupt.   Lear’s image of himself here, as the judge, the one who will bring justice is ironically at the point where he no longer has the power or authority to do so.  Similar to the speeches where he calls upon the gods to cleanse the world, seeing himself as a Noah-like figure, Shakespeare underlines Lear’s ironically helpless rage, despite his yearning for vengeance.
It is through these moments beneath the “enmity of the air” that Lear can begin the process in relearning his own humanity, when he exposes himself to “feel what wretches feel.”   As he slides deeper into madness, his moments of insight become much sharper and clearer, surfacing momentarily out of a disconnected, inchoate whirl of rage and bitter disgust.  He feels revoltion and disgust toward the female sexuality, the “forks... riotous appetite”, and the “fiends... [below] the girdle”.  We have a man who has lost all faith with mankind, yet his hand “smells of mortality” – an insight into Lear’s realisation that mortality is meaningless, as “man’s life is cheap as beasts” and man himself is nothing but a “bare, forked animal.”  As does Gloucester, Lear sees “how the world goes” only after it’s too late.  The play is insistent on the wheel’s tendency to “come full circle.”
Near humility and acceptance Lear’s real relearning occurs, with his reconciliation with the righteous and honest Cordelia.  In the play she is flawless, raising the question over whether she is more of a symbol than a character.  She represents virtue and chastity in a play full of evil and lust.  Lear sees himself a “foolish, fond old man” perhaps not worthy of his allegations that he is “a man more sinned against than sinning.”  He shows regret, sincerity and softness in a voice of gentleness and sympathy.  Similar to the ‘birds i’the cage’ speech Lear shows a tone of gentle humility,  separation from the world that’s different to the more irresponsible kind of I,i.  This speech proposes an ideal and simple humanity, yet images of a songbird, of “gilded butterflies”, images of beauty, show the fragile and easily crushed nature of the ideal Lear creates.
This scene is genuinely touching in an incredible dark and bleak play, yet the bitter irony is that it’s snatched away.  As Lear bursts onto the scene, Cordelia in his arms, the death of hope and redemption is enacted, as Lear searches for breath from his innocent daughter’s face.  The stark reality of her death is summed up with three blunt monosyllables – “dead as earth.”  In his last instant before death, Lear rediscovers his kingly and warrior power in killing Cordelia’s hangman, but it’s too late.  This harsh reality reiterates the truth in Gloucester’s speech – “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, the kill us for their sport.”  Fate is not friendly.  This is an image of total, pointless, empty despair.  “why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?”  Shakespeare raises yet again the question on whether human life counts more than animal’s. 
The grim and dark world that is depicted in this play, will, in Gloucester’s words, “wear out to naught,” as the ending dramatises the uncaring nature of fate.  It brings unhappiness, loss and death, but is this ‘just’?  Can “ripeness” account for the deaths of not only the evil and wicked, yet the virtuous.  In the closing scene, although there is some moral retribution, the evil no longer “grow... prosper,” yet we are left oddly unsatisfied by that.  It seems that those “bound upon a wheel of fire have no hope.  “Men must endure” the blows of fate: the mutilation of Gloucester’s eyes, the poison in which Regan was killed and the rope that hanged Cordelia.  Those left to continue in life and reunite the two pieces of coronet in the play’s final moments of stage time are left with a sense of an empty acceptance.
we're nearly over. oh my god
english, literature, francais, methods and psych
hoping for 85+

Chihiro

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Re: King Lear
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2008, 04:00:48 pm »
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Hey amycourty, that was really good, i'm sure a lot above the average :). I wrote an essay on similar paragraphs just before.

Only one suggestion (although feel free to disregard, I sometimes hate it when my stuff gets critiqued)
I think you're paragraphs need a little tightening, sometimes it felt like you were going on a bit of a tangent, but not one that took one idea and explored it.

Also, we've been taught that you should find one view/value in the passages given then demonstrate how the three passages reflect this view value through literary techniques/imagery and so forth. Just wondering if that's what you do or whether you examine a myriad of views/values?

Well done though, you should do really well come Thursday 3pm!!!