Justice - Para 1

Intro

Staged for a Jacobean audience accustomed to a providential moral order in which rulers served as God’s deputies and virtue merited reward, Shakespeare’s tragic play, King Lear, interrogates the structures by which justice is imagined to operate. Albany’s confidence that “friends shall taste the wages of their virtues” articulates such a worldview; yet Shakespeare ultimately weakens and dismantles this binary, exposing the instability of moral and legal justice.

albany believes..

the good should receive remunerative materialistic rewards while transgression deserves punitive retribution.

AO2 from quote in Q

The antithesis between ‘friends…virtue’ and ‘foes…deservings’ highlights his binary moral judgment.

Albany is a…

moral arbiter and conscience of the court

‘Tigers not daughters’ AO2

Animalistic imagery dehumanises the sisters, depicting them both as predatory and power-hungry.

sycophancy sentence

The sisters’ earlier sycophancy gives way to predatory cruelty, culminating in Albany’s denunciation of them as ‘Tigers not daughters’; a line which exposes their moral monstrosity.

Hudson critics

refers to the sisters as ‘personifications of ingratitude’

Edgar is portrayed as a symbol of moral justice when?

by Lear who thrusts Poor Tom into the role as a just judge in his attempt of a mock trial - sisters tried in absentia

“Most learned justicer!”

Superlative and address term emphasises Lear’s madness but also wisdom as he sees value in Poor Tom. Epithet “learned” implies superior moral qualities which foreshadows Edgar becoming king

Litigation

Link to mock trial scene - to resolve disputes

Cornwall’s servant intervenes during Gloucester’s blinding

“better service…than now to bid you hold”

James I’d essay??

“The True Lawe of Free Monarchies” - he describes the act of a son revolting against/ controlling/ killing/ cutting his father off as “monstrous and unnatural”

What does the servant do?

He redefines service as ethical rather than feudal.

Sisson??

Maintains that “there is in fact a poetic justice in King Lear.” His proof is Gonerill, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund all perish in their sins.

The servant’s anonymity and subsequent death..

Underscores fragility of this justice.