Through experience and suffering, one tightens one's grasp on reality. In William Shakespeare's King Lear, the characters' impressions of their society change as their status changes. Lear's and Gloucester's views of their once perfect society is...

Among the various definitions of tragedy, the one most commonly proffered is: a play that treats - at the most uncompromising level - human suffering, or pathos, with death being the usual conclusion. According to Aristotle's Poetics, the purpose...

As one of the most significant moments in Shakespeare's King Lear, the scene described in Act 4, Scene 6, lines 131-146 provides insight into the parallels within the play and offers a definition of true meaning through irony. King Lear is the...

In Leviathan from 1651, philosopher Thomas Hobbes reflects on "the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal... the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and...

This Great Stage of Fools: The Journey of Delusion and Deceit in

Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's King Lear

Perhaps more than any other period in British history, the English Renaissance embodied the themes of deception and...

The characters in Shakespeare's play King Lear endure immense physical, psychological, and emotional torment before meeting their demises. Shakespeare's exploration of their pain underlines two existential quandaries. First, the play's violence...

In Shakespeare's tragedy “King Lear,” Lear, king of England, surrenders all of this power to his daughters as a reward for their demonstration of love towards him. This untimely abdication of his throne results in a chain reaction of events that...

In his study Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, Grigori Kozintsev expresses how the plot of King Lear sets in motion “an unstoppable avalanche of the fragments of structures, attitudes, ties, all intermingled in frenzied movement”. Indeed,...

The Christian kings of England could suppose a "divine right" imposed by "natural order" in order to legitimize their place in the feudal hierarchy, a view bolstered by Christ's admonishment to "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's"...

In Akira Kurosawa's transformation of King Lear into Ran, the flat character of the Lear's Fool has evolved into Hidetora's Kyoami, a character who exhibits a number of personal complexities absent from Shakespeare's Fool. Both characters have a...

As in his Hamlet, Shakespeare uses “reason in madness” throughout King Lear by using unexpected characters to help with his overall theme of recognition and realization. However, reason in madness can also refer to Shakespeare himself, because in...

In four of Shakespeare's plays, he introduces a character who is illegitimate. Philip Faulconbridge, Don John, Thersites, and Edmund are all children who were born out of wedlock. Also, all four characters were antagonists, if not the main...

King Lear and Don Quixote use madness to acknowledge the unpleasant truths of humanity. Don Quixote entertains a fundamentally comic madness; while, King Lear offers a more tragic interpretation of insanity. Both protagonists, King Lear and Don...

‘Nothing, my lord.’

‘Nothing!’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing will come of nothing…’

King Lear (I.1.78-81)

Shakespeare saturates King Lear with metaphors which, in their ‘literalization’, aid a single, over-arching metaphor that guides the course of tragedy in...

The Christian will not find comfort in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Imbued with the ideals of divine justice and good prevailing over evil, the Christian will be appalled as he delves into the tragedy to find pure-hearted gentlemen reduced to...

In an excerpt from Sir Robert Filmer’s The Natural Power of Kings, the defined paternal positions of father and king are inextricably synonymous. In the periods in which William Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and King Lear both...

If you used the word faggot in Shakespeare’s time; you wouldn’t be called a homophobe, you’d simply be referring to a bundle of sticks. If you considered women less capable than men; you wouldn’t be called a misogynist, you’d be a Jacobean...

A heroine can be defined in two different ways: the first, as the principal female character in a novel; or in the second way, as a woman noted for a courageous action or significant accomplishment. The heroines of King Lear, Crime and Punishment...

A key motivator to the horrific violence and machiavellian betrayal that is present in King Lear is inter generational rivalry. In modern England the older generation held power and authority over the young, yet in Shakespeare’s Jacobean tragedy...

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines worth (n.) as the position or standing of a person in respect of property. On the other hand, worth is also defined as the character or standing of a person in respect of moral or intellectual qualities;...

The Subtlety of Edgar's Importance in King Lear

Any great work of literature stems from the cohesion of many elements to create a piece that is memorable and captivating. William Shakespeare's plays gained notoriety for the ability their...

Shakespeare’s two plays King Lear and Macbeth take place in two contrasting settings that, from the first scenes, influence the characters’ paths and shape the course of the plays’ events. The action of both plays alternate between the settings of...

William Shakespeare is no stranger to the bending and breaking of conventions. Hailed as an inventor of words from “elbow” to “sneak”, and a master playwright who created some of the most enduring plot structures, like that of Romeo and Juliet,...

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the titular ruler undergoes multiple trials in his wish to pass the kingdom on to his three daughters and their betrotheds. After the disownment and banishment of his youngest daughter Cordelia, Lear’s elder daughters...