Exploring King Lear

“Nothing will come of nothing.”

William Shakespeare, King Lear

As we read King Lear, we are pausing after each act to reflect on the action of the play. Using the key features of the tragedy genre, as outlined by Aristotle, we are analysing the text and its place as a work of tragedy. Each of the PDF’s below outline the discussion points for each act.

Act One: The Exposition

King-Lear-Act-1-Collaboration

Following the reading of this section of the play, we brainstormed everything that comes of ‘nothing’ in the first scene of Act One.

The Great Chain of Being concept was explored as a way to help us understand the Elizabethan way of life.

Key Quotations

• “Nothing will come of nothing.”- Lear
• “Come not between the dragon and his wrath”- Lear
• “The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft.”- Lear
• “See better Lear, and let me still remain the true blank of thine eye.”- Kent
• “The jewels of our father, with washed eyes Cordelia leaves you. I know what you are…”- Cordelia
• ” ‘Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath yet ever but slenderly known himself.”- Regan
• ‘Why brand they us with base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?”- Edmund
• “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”- Edmund
• ‘Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.”- Gloucester
• “I have perceived a most faint neglect of late…”- Lear
• “Sirrah, you were best take my coxcomb.”- Fool
• ‘Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest, ride more than thou goest, learn more than thou trowest, set less than thou throwest; leave thy drink and thy whore and keep in-a-door, and thou shalt have more than two tens to a score.”- Fool
• “Dost thou call me fool, boy? (Lear) All thy other titles thou has given away; that thou wast born with”- Fool
• “That’s a shealed peascod”- Fool
• “The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that it had its head bit off by its young.”- Fool
• “Does any here know me? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, or his discernings are lethargied…who is it that can tell me who I am?”- Lear
• “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”- Lear
• ‘Striving to be better, oft we mar what’s well.”- Albany

Act Two: The Rising Action

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Key Quotations:

• “A tailor make a man?”- Cornwall
• “…anger hath a privilege.”- Kent
• “Fortune, good night; smile once more, turn thy wheel.”- Kent
• “Brought near to beat…Edgar I nothing am.”- Edgar
• “All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men, and there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him that’s stinking.”- Fool
• “We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body.”- Lear
• “But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter; or rather a disease that’s in my flesh”- Lear
• “Shut up the doors, my lord; ’tis a wild night. My Regan counsels well. Come out o’ the storm.”- Cornwall

Act Three: The Climax

Copy-of-King-Lear-Reading-Exploration

Key Quotations:

• “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks…strike flat the thick roundity of the world, crack natures moulds, all germans spill at once, that make ungrateful man!”- Lear
• “Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.”- Lear
• “No, I will be the pattern of patience; I will say nothing.”- Lear
• “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”- Lear
• “The tempest in my mind doth from my senses take all feeling else save what beats there.”- Lear
• “O, I have ta’en too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may’st shake the superflux to them and show the heavens more just.”- Lear
• “Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume…unaccommodated man is no more but a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Com, unbutton here.”- Lear

Act Four: The Falling Action

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During this act, we also paused to refresh our understanding of the tragic hero and how it has, so far, applied to the text. We summarized these thoughts on the board.

Key Quotations:

• ” “Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.” -Gloucester
• “Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed? A father, and a gracious aged man, whose reverence even the head-lugged bear would lick, most barbarous, most degenerate, have you madded.”- Albany
• ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep.”- Albany
• “It is the stars, the stars above us, govern our conditions.”- Kent
• “As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud, crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, with hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flowers, darnel and all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn.”- Cordelia (describing how Lear was found)
• “In nothing am I changed but in my garments” – Edgar
• “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.”- Lear
• “I see it feelingly.”- Glouscester
• “Through tatter clothes, small vices do appear; robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.”- Lear
• “Reason in madness!”- Edgar
• “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”- Lear
• “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave. Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead.”- lear
• “I am old and foolish.”- Lear

Act Five: The Denouement

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Key Quotations:

• “We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness.”- Lear
• “Jesters do oft prove prophets.”- Regan
• “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.”- Edgar
• “Mine eyes are not the best, I’ll tell you straight.”- Lear
• “No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?”
• “O let him pass! He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.”- Kent
• “The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.”- Edgar