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Shakespeare: King Lear
In this twenty-five part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores Shakespeare’s King Lear. We begin with a broad introduction to the historical, political and intellectual context of early 17th-century England. After that, we go through the play scene by scene, providing close reading and detailed analysis, with commentary on character, plot, themes and motifs, language, symbolism – and more.
We use the Arden (Third Series) edition of the play. Students using a different edition of the play may encounter slight differences in both the text and line numbers.
Introduction
In this module, we provide a broad introduction to the play, focusing in particular on: (i) the basic plot of the Leir/Lear myth, which dates back to at least the 12th century; (ii) the historical context to the play (early 17th-century England); (iii) the position of ‘King Lear’ in Shakespeare’s career; (iv) the importance of family (especially the relationship between a father and his children), as well as the themes of nature and old age; and (v) Shakespeare’s experimentalism, and the ways in which ‘King Lear’ might have confounded audience expectations.
one of the best known of Shakespeare's strategies
00:00:02and in many ways the most powerful.
00:00:05Where Hamlet is enigmatic and Beth is full of superstition and witchcraft,
00:00:08King Lear
00:00:14is dominated
00:00:15by two ideas.
00:00:17The idea of nothing
00:00:18and the idea of nature.
00:00:21Now you know the story. The story really is quite a simple story. King Lear
00:00:24decides to divide his kingdom
00:00:30among his three daughters,
00:00:32two of whom are nasty, gone Ronald Reagan
00:00:34and one of whom
00:00:37is innocent, naive and honest and direct.
00:00:38And when she is asked what she can say to express her love
00:00:43for her father to earn one third of the newly divided kingdom,
00:00:48she utters the famous world
00:00:53nothing.
00:00:56And he says,
00:00:59nothing will come of nothing.
00:01:01Speak again.
00:01:03He wants her to say something he wants him to be,
00:01:04to tell him lies. He wants to hear that she loves him more than the other
00:01:07sisters,
00:01:11and she says nothing.
00:01:13And that's it. If she had said, Daddy, I love you,
00:01:16there wouldn't have been a play
00:01:18and he loses it.
00:01:21He banishes her
00:01:22and the whole kingdom. The whole world, then falls apart.
00:01:24This is the thing about King Lear is the one that is most universal in
00:01:31that the whole world as well as the family as well as the nation.
00:01:36Everything falls apart in this one.
00:01:40So why is Shakespeare being so if you like negative
00:01:45answer simple.
00:01:51This play was staged probably about 16 Oh, five.
00:01:54Now you know what happened in 16 Oh three.
00:01:59That's when Queen Elizabeth the first
00:02:03died.
00:02:05She had been the queen for about 44 years,
00:02:06all of Shakespeare's lifetime. In fact,
00:02:10Shakespeare didn't know another monarch until this point,
00:02:13and Shakespeare had spent all the 15 nineties writing plays
00:02:17about monarchy, about responsibility, about society, in governance.
00:02:22And he was exploring questions of responsibility
00:02:28and power all the way through the play's About Kings, the plays
00:02:32about people like Hamlet.
00:02:36They are about power and authority
00:02:38and, of course,
00:02:41were relevant to the whole discussion of what
00:02:42would happen when the old lady eventually died.
00:02:44This story of King Lear in the division of
00:02:50the kingdom's was actually considered to be historically true.
00:02:52There are many versions of a story of a real
00:02:57English king called Lear, spelled L E. I. R.
00:03:01And the Division of the Kingdom.
00:03:05Coincidentally, a version of that story was published in 16 oh five.
00:03:08What we don't know is whether that was as a result
00:03:14of the success of Shakespeare's version or whether
00:03:18it was that which inspired Shakespeare's version directly.
00:03:21There are two schools of thought on that, but the story was known before that.
00:03:25Anyway, What is certain is that in 16 oh five,
00:03:29the French essayist Montaigne had published
00:03:33by then of the affections of fathers to their Children,
00:03:38and this is very much the hot topic of one of maintains essays.
00:03:43And Mantei Gnaeus essays were very popular
00:03:49and were translated by John Florio, and Shakespeare certainly knew them.
00:03:52So the subject matter
00:03:57is more family
00:03:59than many of the royal plays like Henry.
00:04:02The 4th, 5th, 6th, Richard the second, Richard the third.
00:04:05Shakespeare had, of course,
00:04:10been closely involved in family matters after the death of his son, Hamnett,
00:04:11in 15 96 which is directly linked by most critics
00:04:18to his writing of Hamlet, which was staged in 1600.
00:04:23So we're talking families,
00:04:29daughters.
00:04:32There is no Queen Lear. We know nothing about her,
00:04:33and we don't even need to ask.
00:04:37But there is a subplot about sons, the sub plot of Gloucester
00:04:39and his
00:04:44illegitimate son,
00:04:45Edmund, who has the immortal line God stand up for bastards
00:04:47and his good
00:04:52son, his real son,
00:04:54Edgar.
00:04:57And I said, This is a tragedy of nothing.
00:05:00It's also a tragedy of another end
00:05:03nature,
00:05:05because in that paradoxical way that English has it.
00:05:07A bastard son is a natural son, even though he's born out of wedlock.
00:05:11And the real
00:05:17air
00:05:20son and heir
00:05:21is the one who was born
00:05:22when
00:05:25the father was married
00:05:26and he is unnatural.
00:05:28What?
00:05:30So we're going to be discussing natural and unnatural quite a lot.
00:05:31And eventually, during the and after the storm scene on the heath,
00:05:36Leer in effect returns
00:05:41to nature.
00:05:43The emblem that I'm going to show you
00:05:46that we will follow all the way through this discussion of the play
00:05:48is this image of man at the centre of the universe
00:05:53famous sketch by Leonardo da Vinci,
00:05:58because that is the image of man. As I said at the centre of the universe
00:06:03and Leah,
00:06:10Edmund and Edgar
00:06:12all see themselves as being at the centre of the universe.
00:06:15That's important.
00:06:21This is humanism,
00:06:23one or two critics, especially G.
00:06:26Wilson Knight,
00:06:29consider this to be a Christian themed play because of
00:06:30the idea of forgiveness that there is in it.
00:06:34For
00:06:36I feel it is distinctly not Christian. It's pre Christian
00:06:38in its ethos
00:06:43and post Christian in its humanism.
00:06:44Humanism is a doctrine first propagated by Erasmus of Rotterdam
00:06:47in the late 14 hundreds,
00:06:52and it very much became
00:06:54known in England after Henry the Eighth, the dissolution of the monasteries,
00:06:57the abolition of the link between the church and Rome
00:07:02and Elizabeth represented the Protestant
00:07:06Dominion.
00:07:10King James, the sixth of Scotland and First of England,
00:07:11represented a continuation of that.
00:07:15But as we know, King James was interested in witchcraft and demons.
00:07:19He wrote a book called Demonology
00:07:23and that's why perhaps Shakespeare wrote a play called Macbeth,
00:07:26which has staged, we think, after King Lear stage in 16 Oh, six.
00:07:31We think this one is 16 oh five,
00:07:36The one he wrote before that is Othella,
00:07:39about 16 oh 43 great tragedies in the period of huge uncertainty
00:07:41in the nation
00:07:49with the arrival of the new king
00:07:51and the end of the monarch
00:07:53whom almost everybody
00:07:56had lived under all their lives.
00:07:59So, yes, it's about old age. Definitely,
00:08:03it's about power and responsibility.
00:08:07But I have always insisted that Shakespeare in the
00:08:11writing of his place in her 37th place,
00:08:15usually in the Cannon
00:08:19every play
00:08:21is an experiment. It's a step forward. He's pushing the envelope, as I like to put it,
00:08:23changing the form and structure of tragedy,
00:08:28and the difference in this tragedy
00:08:33is that there is
00:08:35no redemption at the end.
00:08:37We will see when we get to act. For
00:08:43that,
00:08:46there is a moment of reconciliation and
00:08:46forgiveness when Cordelia comes back from exile
00:08:48and she and her father are reunited,
00:08:53and the audience must think
00:08:57when Cordelia and King Lear are reunited
00:08:59that it's going to be all right. There is going to be a happy ending. The nasty ones.
00:09:03Ronald, Reagan and Edmund. They're gonna be defeated. Surely,
00:09:09and all will be well in the kingdom.
00:09:13Well, that doesn't happen.
00:09:16That is Shakespeare's big experiment in tragic form in this play,
00:09:19in the Chronicle versions of King Lear, the versions that everybody would know
00:09:24there is a happy ending.
00:09:30They are reunited, King Lear becomes king,
00:09:32Cordelia becomes queen
00:09:35and lives on after his death,
00:09:38not in Shakespeare.
00:09:43That's the big change he has made to the source material.
00:09:44And it's what makes King Lear so very special as a tragedy. Because there is no hope.
00:09:48It is the worst. It is.
00:09:58Pushing everything to the edge of the
00:10:00abyss is pushing everything towards absurdity.
00:10:03And there's a recent critic, John Coates,
00:10:08who in a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary,
00:10:11wants to show that King Lear is the closest we have
00:10:14to the 20th century idea of absurdity,
00:10:19of the meaninglessness
00:10:22of life.
00:10:25Most tragedies are even in their deepest tragedy,
00:10:26life affirming.
00:10:31This one seems not to be. It's a different kind of theatrical experience
00:10:33from the normal tragedy,
00:10:40and that's what makes it exciting to read.
00:10:42
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2019, February 26). Shakespeare: King Lear - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-king-lear-john-mcrae/act-2-scene-2-oswald-and-kent
MLA style
McRae, J. "Shakespeare: King Lear – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 26 Feb 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/shakespeare-king-lear-john-mcrae/act-2-scene-2-oswald-and-kent