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.