King Lear Literary Elements

Tragedy

English

The play is set ancient Britain.

There is no single narrator in King Lear, but the play follows Lear's perspective closely as he experiences a fall from power and a decline into senility.

The tone of the play is hopeless and cynical. The mood of the play is bleak and foreboding.

Lear and his supporters are the protagonists. Goneril, Regan, and Edmund are antagonists.

The central conflict in King Lear is that, after Lear cruelly disinherits his favorite daughter, his other two daughters, Goneril and Regan, betray him and strip him of his power.

The climax of the play occurs in Act Three, when Lear's words make it clear that he has descended into a mad state.

Gloucester metaphorically comparing Goneril and Regan to animals that will pluck out their father's eyes foreshadows his own mutilation in Act Three.

One could argue that most of the fool's warnings to King Lear are examples of understatement, as they are serious warnings couched in entertaining or riddle-like language.

The play makes frequent allusions to its source material, Holinshed's Chronicles, as well as to other early modern texts like Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and political tracts written by King James I.

Important imagery in the play includes animals, clothing, eyes, children, and disease.

The central paradox of the play is that only in descending into a state of powerless senility does Lear gain the self-knowledge that could have protected him.

Lear and Gloucester can be considered characters that parallel one another, as they both misjudge their children at the beginning of the play. After Gloucester is blinded, he finally recognizes the truth about his sons, while Lear's descent into madness is what leads him to long for the love of his daughter Cordelia.

Lear personifies the storm on the heath as a raging conqueror, emphasizing both Lear's approaching madness and his desperation just before the climax of the play.

The most prevalent dramatic device in King Lear is dramatic irony, in which the audience is privy to information that other characters do not know. One example of dramatic irony is Edgar being disguised as Poor Tom, but Gloucester treating him as a beggar rather than recognizing the son he longs to see again.