Lear AO5

Question 1

Katsan

Answer 1

Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering

Question 2

A.C Bradley on fortune in Shakesperean tragedy

Answer 2

Fortune…a power which appears to smile on him for a little, and then on a sudden strikes him down in his pride.

Question 3

A.C Bradley on suffering in Shakesperean tragedy

Answer 3

Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and…generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe

Question 4

Mack

Answer 4

madness is to some degree a punishment or doom, corresponding to the adage

Question 5

Rutter

Answer 5

Having learned the language to survive his love test, they now assume the male voice, the male space Lear abandons.

Question 6

Rutter on daughters as monsters

Answer 6

But then the play makes the daughters ugly: the two who speak are monsters; the one who does not is monstered.

Question 7

Kermode on suffering

Answer 7

Suffering is the consequence of a human tendancy to evil, as inflicted on the good by the bad; it can reduce humanity to a bestial condition, under an apparently indifferent heaven.

Question 8

Kermode on good and bad

Answer 8

The voices of the good are distorted by pain, those of the bad by the coarse excess of their wickedness

Question 9

O’Toole

Answer 9

The story bursts out beyond the moral ending of the play, the overwhelming sense of injustice breaks through the even balancing of good and evil. And this isn’t the failure of the play: it is the whole point of the play’s structure

Question 10

Salgado

Answer 10

Lear at the beginning of the play is a King, a father, a master and a man. As the action develops, the first three roles are stripped from him and he is forced to consider what the last of them means.

Question 11

Norris

Answer 11

The horror of Lear’s story is the unnatural behaviour of Goneril and Regan. They are daughters who revolt against their father, subjects who revolt against their king, sisters who betray each other, sisters who betray their husbands; these are not only personal sins, but an upsetting of civilised values.

Question 12

S. L Goldberg

Answer 12

There is no supernatural justice- only human natural justice

Question 13

Orwell on the fool

Answer 13

A trickle of sanity throughout the play

Question 14

Khoza on the storm

Answer 14

The storm in Lear works inventively on a number of levels. The elemental storm, the social storm which shakes the divided kingdom, the inner storm that drives Lear mad; all are inter connected and reinforce one another to achieve the sense of overall darkness and despair’

Question 15

Dollimore

Answer 15

‘For the humanist the tragic paradox arises here: debasement gives rise to dignity and at the moment when Lear might be expected to be most brutalised he becomes most human’

Question 16

Charles A Hallett

Answer 16

‘He enters Act 3 the least introspective of Shakespeare’s protagonists but leaves it a man, who immersed in the cauldron of internal and external termoil, develops, or at least discovers his soul’

Question 17

Charles A Hallett

Answer 17

‘This is the impact of the series of storm scenes. They are to convey the experience of suffering that will, in both a positive and negative sense, take the protagonist outside of himself’

Question 18

Charles A Hallett

Answer 18

‘The outcome of Lear contending with the storm is both his madness and redemption’

Question 19

Sean McEvoy

Answer 19

‘Lear has to be stripped of all of his office and power before he can see through the ideology of kingship

Question 20

C.J Sisson

Answer 20

The idea upon which the play rests is indeed the consequence of a grave error and abuse of justice by the king within whose powers justice lies

Question 21

Johnson

Answer 21

“A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry”

Question 22

Ignatieff

Answer 22

The heath is both a real place and a place in the mind. It is what the human world would be like if pity, duty, and the customs of honour and due ceased to rule human behaviour. It is the realm of natural man, man beyond society, without clothes, retinue, pride and respect.

Question 23

Peck

Answer 23

Edgar is the personification of justice to vindicate the…rightful order

Question 24

Coledrige

Answer 24

Virtue itself seems to be in good company with him

Question 25

Gould

Answer 25

The fact that Edmund is an illegitimate child is his identifying feature in the world of the play and he is angry with this