A comparative study of two texts reveals context as the primary influence upon the interplay between pragmatism and personality morality in an individual’s pursuit and consolidation of power. Driven by an overarching contextual desire for stable...

The title of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is often criticized, argued that it should be titled Brutus, as Marcus Brutus is the tragic hero. However, the title is appropriate, as Julius Caesar, though insignificant as an actor in the play since he...

The wives of Caesar and Brutus played a very key role in Act II, scenes 1 and 2 in Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare. They both significantly affected their husbands. They had to do something to influence their husbands to prevent them from doing...

Ruling over the Roman Empire from 60 B.C. to the time of his death in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar is one of the most widely recognized historical figures of all time. His legacy was immortalized through the writing of William Shakespeare’s play Julius...

Power struggles are a defining feature in many of William Shakespeare’s stories. Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and Julius Caesar are three prominent examples of such stories, each depicting a powerful protagonist and their conflicts with others...

Shakespeare is perhaps the best-known name in the world. Naturally so, since his plays have been a part of the canon for a long time, with Julius Caesar among them. There have been thousands of adaptations of Julius Caesar let alone Shakespeare’s...

In Shakespeare’s play King Lear, King Lear tells his daughter Cordelia that, “Nothing will come of nothing”(Shakespeare 1.1.99). This idea of nothingness plays a major role in Shakespeare’s King Lear and As You Like It. King Lear is a tragedy that...

In Elizabethan times, the role of a fool, or court jester, was to professionally entertain others, specifically the king. In essence, fools were paid to make mistakes. Many of the fool's quips and riddles were made at the expense of the king. The...

The images of sight given, taken, or abused resonate deeply in King Lear from Kent's first imperative, "See better, Lear" (I.i.158), to the painful images of a stumbling, eyeless Gloucester. Such imagery, drawn both dramatically and verbally,...

In King Lear, the recurring images of sight and blindness associated with the characters of Lear and Gloucester illustrate the theme of self-knowledge and consciousness that exist in the play.

These classic tropes are inverted in King Lear,...

A common practice that William Shakespeare employs in many of his works is the experimentation with gender politics. Shakespeare often shows how notions of gender become unstable as a result of social forces. To discuss Shakespeare's treatment of...

In the first scene of the first act of King Lear Cordelia, Lear's youngest daughter, is banished from his sight forever. As per his decree, she does not return to the stage until the end of the drama. Yet Cordelia's actions and attitude...

Auden once asserted that Shakespearean tragedy is necessarily parabolic, pertaining to the only myth that Christianity possesses: that of the 'unrepentant thief'. We as the spectators are thus implicated in the action since each of us 'is in...

'All's Cheerless, Dark and Deadly' Are Kent's Words a Fair Summary of The Tragedy of King Lear?

Samuel Johnson asserted that the blinding of Gloucester was an 'act too horrid to be endured in a dramatic exhibition', and that he was 'too shocked'...

King Lear, as both head of state and paterfamilias, has multiple claims to power, and to obedience. His spectacle of dividing the kingdom between his daughters confuses their obligations to him as subjects with their filial obligations, duties...

"There is a cliff, whose high and bending head

Looks fearfull in the confin'd deep.

Bring me but to the very brim of it...

... From that place I shall no leading need."(IV.i.73)

It is often difficult to gain entry into a work of such complete and...

If Shakespeare penned two King Lears, he created three King Lears. There is the Quarto's hero, the Folio's hero, and the hero who exists somewhere in the interplay. The last of these is not the same Lear who emerges variously in various conflated...

As the audience gears up for King Lear's death, as they bite their nails at the coming sword fight between the two separated brothers, they notice that within all this royal drama a silly cat fight has developed between Regan and Goneril. We can...

Throughout most of Shakespeare's King Lear, the hero is mad; when not, he is deluded. In his gorgeous speech of V.iii.8-26, Lear displays a newfound, optimistic view of his future with Cordelia moments before Edmund orders her death. Lear's...

In Shakespeare's King Lear, the characters in a position of power are most often the ones who are blindest to the truth. Only after losing that power are they able to gain a clear understanding of the events occurring around them and to realize...

A recurring theme throughout William Shakespeare's King Lear is the perpetual struggle between order and chaos, played out in the arena of human existence. While such characters as Lear, Cordelia, Albany and Edgar try to impose their sense of...

The first time the Fool enters in Shakespeare's King Lear he immediately offers Kent his coxcomb, or jester's hat. Lear asks the Fool "My pretty knave, how dost thou?" (1.4.98) This initial action and inquiry of the Fool is representative of the...

In The Tragedy of King Lear, William Shakespeare drags his audience through horrific tragedy to get to the core of truth. Violence, pain, betrayal, and finally death come crashing down upon almost every character, good or bad. This peeling away of...

This essay concentrates on Act 111, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's King Lear, a tragic and powerful scene in which we witness Lear's mind tragically giving way to the menace of madness, which has relentlessly pursued him throughout the play. However,...