King Lear AO4 Flashcards
inheritance issues
Elizabeth I had been unmarried and childless, creating a fear of civil war at her death
James I
he wanted to unite his two territories into one British kingdom - Lear’s decision to divide the kingdom would have struck many in the audience as the height of folly
“thou” compared to “you”
“thou” was the pronoun used to address close friends and children
“you” was the polite, respectable form - Kent is therefore being disrespectful when he addresses Lear as “thou”
the law of primogeniture
traditional method of passing on wealth and property, meant that the first-born son inherited the family fortune and his father’s titles - Edmund is entitled to nothing as the illegitimate son
Edmund’s Machiavellian practices
deception, betrayal and sexual misconduct
stage directions in Quarto version to implicate Edmund’s intentions on Act II Scene 2
when Cornwall and others enter to find out what the noise is all about, Edmund enters first - Quarto text adds “with his rapier drawn”, as he dashes on ahead of the others and tries to part Kent and Oswald before they arrive, suggesting both his dynamic, active personality and his desire to make a good impression on Cornwall
the stocks
locked around the victim’s ankles, leaving him/ her trapped in an uncomfortable, publicly humiliating position, especially demeaning for a former Earl of Kent
Renaissance women
They did not have independent property rights and were financially at the mercy of men. Girls were reliant on their fathers for dowries and once they were married, their fortunes belonged to their husbands - some would say that Goneril and Regan have good reason to assert themselves, though in fighting society’s restrictions, they also discard all sense of right and wrong
why would the treatment of Lear have shocked the original audience?
in 1610, James I told parliament, “Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods”
storm imagery used by Shakespeare in Act III Scene 1
Shakespeare could not show his audience a raging storm with set - instead he uses description to create appropriate pictures in their imaginations - the Gentleman’s description of Lear in the storm prepares us for the acts of the next scene
“bastard”
as the play was printed in 1608, and again in 1623, the reference to Edmund being a “bastard” is perhaps stressing stock associations of the word with unpleasantness and impurity
why was the mock trial omitted from the Folio version of the play?
some feel that the scene is “unactable”, difficult to convey clearly to the audience, so Shakespeare removed it, whilst others contend that it holds up the action and slows the pace of the story at a moment when a sense of urgency is required
Gloucester’s rebuke to Regan, “Naughty lady” in Act III Scene 7
contemporary audiences may associate it with small children - in the 17th century, “naught” meant “nothing” and by extension “morally worthless”, so Gloucester is accusing her of behaving in an evil way
why was the play banned from the stage from 1788 to 1820?
the king at the time, George III, was suffering from mental problems and audiences might the depiction of Lear to be either amusing or in bad taste - this reminds us that, for audiences of past centuries, a distressed King would have seemed a far more alarming and important topic that it does today
