KING LEAR – How to write a critical analysis of the play

Read the play, then think about what kind of play it is and what sort of broad pattern you can see in the plot.

‘King Lear’ is a tragedy. It begins with King Lear dividing his kingdom between his daughters. He intends to divide it in three, but one daughter, Cordelia, refuses to say how much she loves him and so is rejected, the other daughters, Goneril and Regan, being giving everything.

Lear tries to keep some power, but this is stripped from him by Goneril and Regan. He is forced out in a storm and goes mad. Cordelia finds him, but their reunion is short lived; she is hanged and Lear dies over her body. There is also a subplot involving Gloucester and his two sons Edgar and Edmund. Gloucester is blinded in the play, and Edgar deceived by Edmund, is banished and forced to disguise himself to save his life, but at the end the good son, Edgar, kills Edmund. Goneril and Regan also die, Goneril committing suicide and Regan being poisoned by her sister.

Look for the standard pattern of a tragedy in the plot. Life is thrown into disarray when Lear divides his kingdom. Goneril and Regan reveal themselves as hungry for total power, turning on their father and on each other. An evil appetite has been unleashed. Notice how the essential concepts of order and disorder are; whereas order is a loving relationship between parents and children disorder is children turning on their father. This is also evident in the subplot, where the evil Edmund is happy to see his father suffer. These base passions that erupt throw the country into chaos, and the central stages of the play, where Lear is forced out of his home, are characterized by a sense of het whole order of civilized life and the whole natural order having fallen apart. At the end of this play, there is a reassertion of positive values, with Lear being reunited with Cordelia and Gloucester with his good son Edgar. The disorder that has been unleashed, however, destroys the lives of most of the characters. Only Edgar survives at the end, promising that things will never be as bad as this again.

What we have in the play, then, is a clear setting of humane values against evil passions that can destroy life. We are made to think about the nature of humankind, that there are animal-like instincts in people which can wreck all our illusions that we live in a civilized world. But the presence of Cordelia and Edgar, and a loyal servant of Lear’s called Kent, offers us something more positive to hold on to.

Look at the first two or three scenes, trying to achieve a sense of what Is happening in the particular play.

In considering the first two acts of a tragedy your main task is to try to achieve a more precise sense of the nature of the disruptive force in the play. You know, however, that you can expect to see base instincts exposed that are usually kept concealed in civilized life. Our analysis of these opening acts is deliberately sketchy as we simply want to provide an illustration of how you can set about interpreting this play.

In the opening scene Kent and Gloucester are discussing Lear’s proposed division of his kingdom. Gloucester then introduces his illegitimate son Edmund to Kent. Lear and his daughter enter and Lear says he is going to divide his kingdom between them according to how much they love him. Goneril and Regan declare their love, but Cordelia refuses to do so. Lear curses her and gives her to the King of France without dowry. Kent tries to intervene but is banished. Then Cordelia goes, leaving Goneril and Regan to discuss how they are going to manage Lear. In selecting parts of this scene and beginning to talk about them you will start to put flesh on the bare bones of your ideas about tragedy. You might, for example, choose to talk about Gloucester and his bastard son Edmund. Gloucester jokes about the fact that Edmund is illegitimate. To interpret the detail, apply our order / disorder formula. Gloucester appears to be an honorable elder statesman, but there is something suspect in his fathering of an illegitimate child, just as there is something callous and distasteful in his facetious attitude as he tells Kent about it. Immediately you have the idea of the appearance of things in society but other instincts lurking beneath the surface. In talking about the detail you will begin to characterize how the standard pattern of base instincts that disrupt life is presented in this play. We have deliberately selected a minor detail to demonstrate how this idea permeates the entire play. The same approach, therefore, can be used for whatever part of the scene you want to discuss in the main part of the scene, for example, order would be exemplified by a natural love between parent and child, but Lear’s vanity in wanting to hear this love expressed is destructive.

Lear’s division of his kingdom unleashes the evil instincts of Goneril and Regan, but you should also try and see that Gloucester and Lear have a less worthy side to their personalities. The second scene develops the Gloucester subplot. Edmund hates Edgar and convinces Gloucester that Edgar intends to kill Gloucester. Again, look for the intrusion of baser instincts here, not only Edmund’s but also those of his father, who if he were a better man would know and trust his son Edgar. Remind yourself that the subplot echoes the main plot: Gloucester, like Lear, is deceived into believing that a faithful child does not love him.

The pattern in Lear is quite easy to determine, it is a clear case of unworthy instincts surfacing, disrupting life and in looking at the first two acts you should find it relatively straightforward to characterize how things get more and more out of hand. The secret of producing good criticism, however, is to avoid just saying ‘Things get out of hand in the first two acts’; the secret of good criticism is to point to, and then discuss as fully as you feel necessary, specific incidents which illustrate this.

Choose a scene from Act II and try to clarify your impression of what this play is about and how it is developing.

What happens in this Act is that Edmund tricks Edgar into fleeing; Goneril and Regan, though distrustful of each other, turn even more against their father, and at the end Lear goes off into the night beginning to fear for his sanity. Any scene you select to discuss here should demonstrate how things are beginning to collapse into chaos; the details you focus on should present a vivid impression of how evil and villainy are beginning to consume this society. There might, however, be scenes, characters and details that you can find in hand to relate to your overall impression. You can ignore such details or return to them later, but really, with a little thought, everything should fit together. One puzzling character, for example, is the Fool, who is constantly in Lear’s company, forever cracking jokes and posing riddles. What helps here is if you know that the fool or clown always serves the same function in Shakespeare’s plays: he is a commentator on people’s follies and pretensions. He comments on social imposture, and his games with language undermine the polite phrases people use in society and harp on the true instincts that motivate people. To pinpoint this with the Fool you would need to look at some of his speeches or songs. For example, in Act II scene iv he says,

‘Fathers that wear rags

Do make their children blind;

But fathers that bear bags

Shall see their children kind’. (II, iv, 47-50)

He is saying, that children will appear affectionate while their father has money, but when the father has nothing to offer them they will turn against him. It is another expression of the idea, which permeates the play, of a more complex reality underlying social appearances.

Choose a scene from Act III to see how it develops the issues you have identified so far, and now begin to pay more attention to the principal characters in the play.

In the third act of a tragedy there are two principal things to be aware of one is that a sense of disorder dominates: this is conveyed to us in this play by the fact that Lear is close to madness, is driven out of doors onto the heath in a terrible storm. The storm seems to suggest a tremendous tumult in the whole universe, as if the whole of life is violent and chaotic, while the madness of Lear seems to represent a loss of faith in the very idea of any sane order. Look at scenes and details which will enable you to convey an impression of this disorder. The other thing that becomes clearer in the central act, however, is the role of the tragic hero. He has seen the worst face of people and is wrestling with the whole problem of evil instincts in humankind that seem to undermine any confidence we might have that we live in a sane world. Focus closely on sections of Lear’s longer speeches. We have selected a speech for m the II scene where Lear is raging in the storm:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow,

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drwon’d the cocks

You sulph’rous and though-execuring fires…’ (III, ii, 1-4).

You may prefer to look at a longer extract than provided here, but the same principles always apply. At first, we could not think what to say about these four lines, but we decided to employ our usual approach of looking for ideas or images of order and disorder. The disorderly images of the rage and violence of the storm are fairly easy to spot but images of order seem more difficult to find. The only ones appear to be the references to the ‘steeples’ on the churches that have been built, and to the ‘cocks’, the weather cocks people use to predict the weather, both of which will be drowned; the idea is that all signs of God’s order and human ordering of the elements will be obliterated and destroyed. The pattern, then, within the speech reflects the pattern of the play as a whole, in which violent forces are unleashed that seek to destroy everything that is part of civilization.

At this stage of the play these forces include Lear himself, who, in his anger and fury, wishes to see all order undone and vengeance visited upon Goneril and Regan. He has yet to recognize his own sin of banishing Cordelia and dividing the kingdom. By the end of this scene (III,ii), however, Lear has begun to change from the vain old man we see at the start of the play; his self-pity is mixed with concern for the Fool and then, in the plight of poor people, embodied in the figure of Poor Tom. The appearance of Poor Tom marks the beginning of Lear’s madness and the collapse of his reason. The order of reason, though, is replaced by the reasoning of madness as Lear tries to confront and understand the world from his new perspective of pain, suffering and compassion for others.

Lear’s character, then, changes and develops in Act III, and this is what we might expect in the central act of a tragedy where things are at their furthest removed from any sense of stable order. As he changes so he comes to serve more and more as a commentator on the whole chaos of life. Through his speeches there are references to the collapse of the cosmic and natural order and to the absence of justice in the human world. He is at the center of things, feeling more acutely the disorder of life. If you look at Lear’s speeches, you should be able to present a full and vivid impression of how he explores the nature of existence in a world where brute forces seem to reign supreme. This sense of the bestiality of life is conveyed especially by the use of animal imagery, but it is also present in the actions of the play, particularly when Gloucester’s eyes are torn out. While you might find it difficult to imaging the staging of the storm scenes with Lear, the blinding of Gloucester in Act III, scene vii, should provide you with a very clear idea of how the play conveys to the audience a picture of the very worst people as Gloucester is bound and first one eye, then the other is ripped out. But what we have to set against such vileness are the very concrete images of the servant who tries to prevent the blinding Gloucester’s courage in facing his torturers, and finally his recognition of his own folly. As with Lear, suffering leads to a reassertion of positive values, though both old men are still a long way from any full understanding of their actions.

In Lear, it is not the hero’s intellect that impresses us but rather his recognition, even as he endures the worst life can offer, of the needs of others, of the need for compassion and feeling in the world. Because of this, and because we see a similar development in Gloucester, ‘King Lear’ offers us a fuller sense of the best qualities of people – underlined in the love and loyalty of Kent and Cordelia.

Choose a scene from Act IV and attempt to build upon everything you have established so far.

The blind Gloucester and the mad Lear both wander to the cliffs at Dover. They have been stripped of everything. They meet in Act IV, scene vi. What you might find hard to cope with here is that Lear’s speeches often seem close to nonsense:

Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this

Piece of toasted cheese will do’t. There’s my gauntlet;

I’ll prove it on a giant.

Burning up the brown bills… (IV, vi, 89-91)

At other points in the play, he seems to have an acute perception in his madness of just what life is like, but sometimes there is nonsense like this. As always, however, search for the easy explanation: his speech is disordered, illogical falling to pieces, but he has understandably lost faith with the ways of reason. If the world is mad, why bother to participate in the sham of logical behavior? As with ‘Hamlet’, we see how Lear as the tragic hero is not superman who can take on and defeat evil, but a mon who wrestles with het problem of the irrationality of life, confronting even his own irrationality.

Instead of concentrating on Lear’s madness, however, you might prefer to look at a scene where the positive values of the play are more evident. One reason why Lear is a rather easier play to study than Hamlet is that it does offer us a clearer sense of something positive to set against the picture of the disorder of experience. The place in particular the reunion scene where Lear rediscovers his love for his daughter (IV, vii). If you look at this scene, try to see how the staging itself creates a sense of order and calm after the storm: there is the music used to awaken Lear, his fresh clothes, the kneeling of the old King to ask his daughter’s forgiveness, all signs of a new harmony in the play. Look too at the language to see how storm and animal imagery are now countered by images of sleep and tears and the dark world of madness gives way to the returning light of sanity in Lear.

Choose a scene from near the end of the play which shows how the issues are resolved, and which will enable you to draw together the threads of your critical analysis.

The most logical place to end the analysis of the tragedy is with the death of the tragic hero. In pulling together the threads of your analysis you need to think about the ideas you have discovered in the play and to shape them into a coherent view. Our view has been that throughout Lear we are presented with a terrifying picture of the worst in people, but that set against it is a positive sense of some of the best qualities in people. We can see this tension at the end. Lear enters carrying the body of the dead Cordelia: if we think about this spectacle, we should be able to see how its effect is to raise questions about the very meaning of life in a world where the innocent are murdered and where justice seem arbitrary. Similar issues are raised by Lear’s speeches:

And my poor fool is hang’d! no no no age!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou no breath aat all?... (V, iii, 305-7)

The animal images here serve to suggest that human life is worth less than that of a beast, and yet the staging itself suggest that this is not the case. Lear’s concern is wholly for Cordelia, all thoughts of himself all but forgotten, the fact that his kingdom has been restored to him of no interest. How you see Lear’s death, or any of the events in the final scenes, is up to you, but avoid the temptation of thinking that the play ends with an ‘answer’ or ‘message’.  What you are most likely to remember, even at the end of the play is the power of the picture it presents of the self-seeking, vicious cruelty in people, and equally the power of the presentation of Lear’s rediscovery through madness of the love of Cordelia. A vision of human bestiality is set against a vision of human ability to endure the worst and to change through suffering. ‘King Lear’ in this respect is a marvelously clear play, as its picture of disorder is balanced by such an awe inspiring tragic hero whose role is fairly easy to see as he journeys from lack of self-knowledge towards redemption and understanding.

HOW TO STUDY A SHAKESPEARE PLAY

You will find that the language is not only old fashioned but also complex and dense.

Structure – Every play can be said to fall into three stages, generally referred to as exposition, complication and resolution.

The play begins with the exposition stage, where we are introduced to the characters and the situation, they find themselves in. At the outset the characters might not seem to have any particular problems but there would not be much to interest us if we were simply confronted with characters who were living happily, continued to live happily and lived happily ever after. Very soon, often in the first scene, a problem develops: something happens which looks as if it is going to disrupt the character’s lives. One way of putting this is to say that a kind of order prevails at the beginning of the play but that very soon this ordered life is thrown into disarray. The central and longest stage of a play is the complication stage.

Shakespeare takes a situation where things are relatively peaceful at the outset, but then shows how the actions of people disrupt that established social order.

Comedy can present an irrational quality in people that undermines any possibility of a rational order in society.

In all plays, however, what happens is that the behavior of the characters creates confusion and social disarray.

Third stage of the play – the resolution stage. In a tragedy, the social order is so thoroughly destroyed that civilized behavior yields to violence, and the play ends with the death of the principal characters. The situation is thus in a way resolved, but what we are principally left with is an impression of the precariousness of the whole idea of social order.

In all plays we see some threat to or disruption of the established order.

The story of a Shakespearean Play – You know that at the outset you will be introduced to various characters and that soon a problem will begin to define itself. Some act, or series of acts will take place that alters the way of life that has existed. During the course of the play, things will become more and more chaotic, so that by the central point of the play life will have become completely topsy turvy. At the end, however, things will sort themselves out in some way: order might be reestablished, or there might be a feeling of temporary peace and taking stock of what has happened, but it could be that the drain of events leads to the death of one or more of the characters.

Every play is built upon a tension between an idea of order and the reality of disorder in society.

 

What should I be trying to do in a critical response?

Look for the broad pattern of the play. Look for the action or actions that trigger off the complications of the play: almost invariably one of the characters acts in a headstrong, or foolish, or ill conceived, or possibly evil way. The act creates discord and disarray. Order yields to disorder. People are at odds with each other, and in which conflicts and disagreements or confusion and misunderstandings dominate. Have some ideas about the particular characteristics of the kind of play you are studying.

The real task of criticism is to capture the distinctive qualities of the play you are studying.

Start looking in more detail at the plot: Remember that you are not only interested in what happens but also in the significance of what happens. General framework helps you to see the overall pattern of the story and can be used as a key to help you interpret any part of the story. If you attempt to discuss too many scenes you are likely to lapse into merely summarizing the action without commenting on its significance.

Concentrate on a few scenes: Look for evidence that the characters feel there is something wrong with the disorderly state of affairs: implicit in every scene will be the idea that life should be more orderly, rational, even though it is in the nature of people to disrupt harmony.

Be aware of the kind of things you can focus on. The six areas of interest in a play are – plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle.

You need a way of focusing and disciplining your impression and again the large ideas we have been working with provide a way of organizing your response.

It can be shown how the main characters are caught between opposite impulses, how they are attracted by an idea of orderly and reasonable behavior yet often find themselves acting illogically and irrationally.

The broad pattern of the plot reproduces itself in the experiences and personalities of the major characters, so that there is a constant tension both in the play as a whole and in the central characters between orderly and disorderly behavior. The minor characters play an important dramatic function, as they often serve to comment on or draw attention to eth gap between how things ought to be in an orderly world and the disorderly state of affairs that prevails in the play.

Tension is also reflected int eh language of the play, where images of order are constantly set against images of disorder and in the thought of a play which we more commonly refer to as a play’s theme.

What, if anything, is Shakespeare trying to say in his plays?

Shakespeare returns again and again to passions that disrupt social order. He writes with the intention of warning people against acting in an antisocial or unruly way. Shakespeare is exploring the reality of human experience, the way in which people do act. He is making us aware of how society is complex because people are complex; of how individual instincts, and passions disturb any ideal of a harmonious society. He writes to explore both the good and the bad qualities in human nature. At the end of a play we come away with an increased awareness of the problems and choices and difficulties that humanity has to face up to.

What distinguishes Shakespeare from other dramatists?

The characters are constantly raising all the larger questions implicit in the play about the whole relationship between a harmonious vision of life and the messy reality of experience. Every Shakespeare play seems to raise fundamental questions about the whole nature and meaning of life.

 Why does Shakespeare write in verse?

Poetry is highly ordered language. When Shakespeare writes in verse, his lines are usually in blank verse – i.e., unrhymed lines, each line containing 10 syllables. In an ordered verse form a character will be talking about the disorder of experience. In Shakespeare’s verse there is a constant tension between the desire for neatness, symmetry and order and the awareness that life itself always burgeons out of control. Presumably at such moments we are closer to the mundane reality of life where order and disorder jostle together.

Do I need to know about Shakespeare’s life and times?

Renaissance period – a shift from an essentially religious world view to an essentially secular world view. People came to feel that they were living in a less familiar somewhat more disturbing world. The medieval period offered people a secure image of a divine order in the universe: there were problems, of course, but the world seemed well ordered. His characters are self-centered and ambitious. The play reveals a sense of a new spirit of individualism which is in conflict with the traditional religious order. Individuals are increasingly presuming to take the initiative in a world where it is used to the be case that everyone knew their place and trusted in God.

Studying a tragedy: Shakespeare’s four major tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.

In tragedy, the dramatist gives full and serious consideration to the disruptive effects of people’s behavior. The consequences are so serios that the order presented leads to the death of the main character at the end of the play. Any play that ends with the death of the main character is a tragedy; the pattern is always the same: the society presented in the play has shifted so far from any orderly standard of behavior that it collapses into violence and the main character is the principal victim of this violence.

In History plays, when things begin to go wrong, it is because people are weak, or fallible, or ambitious, or resent authority.

In tragedies, the passion that disrupt life are far more extreme: there is a focusing on the evil in human beings, an evil that results not just in the death of the tragic hero but also in the deaths of the innocent and good who seem to be singled out for destruction for no other reason than that they are innocent. The tragedies, force us to ask how such qualities as goodness, love, justice and loyalty can survive in the world given people’s capacity for evil and destruction.

If we assume that at the beginning of a tragedy life is much as it always has been, some action then takes place that disturbs the status quo. The moment the façade of order is shattered, we begin to see the cruel, vicious and murderous side of people, to see the self-seeking, hatred and violence.

(Taken from the note edited by John Peck and Martin Coyle)

Read about how to answer Essay Questions on Shakespeare's Plays by clicking the link: https://sstuffsimplified.blogspot.com/2021/05/how-to-answer-questions-on-shakespeares.html

 

HOW TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ON SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS - ESSAY QUESTIONS

Examination papers on Shakespeare usually feature three kinds of questions. The first kind commonly referred to as a context question consists of a short extract from a play, usually a single speech, followed by a number of specific questions about this passage. The second kind of question presents a longer extract from a play, perhaps about 50 lines and asks you to write an essay in which you discuss this passage and relate it to the play as a whole. It is these two kinds of questions that are considered popular. The third is the traditional essay question, where you are asked to discuss a statement about a play or asked to look at a particular aspect of a play.

Whatever kind of question is set, however, its purpose is not only to test your understanding of a play and your response to it, but also to test your ability to express your response and understanding. You should always try to remember that the way in which you present your response – which covers both the overall organization of your answer and the quality of your writing – is every bit as important and the quality of your ideas. You have to see what the question is about and then write clearly and sensibly. Proper use of paragraphs and writing in grammatical sentences.

Things to bear in mind:

-         Your essay is likely to prove most effective if it has a simple overall structure, looking at a different aspect of the play in each paragraph.

-         Use the opening paragraph to set you your controlling ideas.

-         In each subsequent paragraph, focus on specific details, but interpret them in the light of your controlling ideas.

-         Don’t try to discuss too much. It is better to do justice to a couple of details in a paragraph, showing how they illustrate and bring to life the wide concerns of the play, than to list a host of details which you don’t bother to justify or to explain.

-         Remember that each paragraph is a step in an argument. As you examine each detail, you are adding to the general sense of the play that is conveyed in your essay and also adding to the sense of how the play dramatizes its issues.

The question: The basic rule of all good essay writing is answering the question set. The question will direct you towards a significant and interesting part or aspect of the play.

Understanding the question: Essay writing becomes a lot easier if you know what sort of questions are usually set. The most common kinds of essay questions on Shakespeare either about a play’s characters or about a play’s themes or technique. In every case you will be asked to analyze and discuss a specific topic or question or statement. You are being asked to present an argument.

In question about characters – you have to move beyond an analysis of the personalities of the characters to a sense of how they are being used by the dramatist and how they illuminate what the play is about and how it works. You have to focus on the characters themselves, but your answer must be informed by a sense of the broader issues inherent int eh play. You are interested in the characters because of the way in which they reflect, reveal and embody the broader concerns of the play.

Questions about themes – always ask or discuss a particular topic or in a play. Although you are asked to focus on a specific topic, your answer must be informed by a sense of the broader issues in the play. Thematic questions often consist of a statement about the play followed by the word ‘discuss’. The statement will often point to a tension in the play, but, if it does not, then you must stop and think and remind yourself that plays always deal with conflicts and problems and that any theme specified will reflect the broader conflict found in the play in some way. Concentrate on the specified topic, showing how and where in specific incidents the theme is evident. Comment on the significance of the details you look at saying how they bring this tension to life.

Questions about technique – focus on the imagery in a play and whether the play is a tragedy or not.

What the examiners want to see – a clear well set out answer which refers to the test a lot. He/she wants to see an essay with a strong, clear central argument closely illustrated. They are interested in how effectively you organize and present and argue the case you are offering.

See the problem involved int eh question.

First paragraph – In the opening paragraph identify the problem, focus on the issue at the heart of the question.

Second paragraph – write about a particular scene or speech in the play. If it is a question about character, it obviously has to be a scene which features that character. Refer to the incident, or quote part of a speech, and then begin to discuss and analyze what you can see happening in this section of the play.

Concentrate on one or two details and really work on these instead of trying to cover everything.

End paragraph with very definite conclusion

If there is more to the issue than you have discussed, you made add more paragraphs.

In the concluding paragraph discuss all the aspects together.

Key points:

The main rule of essay writing is to keep the overall structure of your essay simple.

Remember that you are always examining a problem, and your answer must therefore develop an argument.

The first paragraph should define the problem you are going to examine.

Subsequent paragraphs need to look closely at the evidence of the text, establishing an answer from specific incidents and details in the play.

An essay needs to develop an argument and each paragraph should be thought of as a step in an argument, advancing the case beyond the point reached at the end of the previous paragraph.

Each step in the argument must develop from the actual evidence of the text.