King Lear and its Context

These flashcards cover important vocabulary and concepts related to the themes and context of Shakespeare's King Lear, reflecting the historical, social, and political issues of the time.

Renaissance

The Renaissance unleashed tensions that made people feel both excited and frightened. ‘Truths’ that had been reliable and comforting for hundreds of years were being questioned and for every person who welcomed the new learning there were others who felt threatened by it. Challenged existing ‘truths’ in all intellectual spheres – astrology, religion, medicine, science, economics, politics – led to more humanist thinking, less reliant on orthodoxy, dogma, the church and the aristocracy (although not fully embedded in all people)

 

It is particularly useful to see Shakespeare’s play as thedramatic manifestations of these tensions– between old, comfortable, conservative belief-systems, and new, challenging, liberating discoveries.

Jacobean theatre

.Against this turbulent backdrop, then, the theatre was the one place where rich and poor could congregate and see enacted, through old or made-up stories, a refracted image of their own desires and anxieties.

 

Jacobean theatre flourished during King James I's reign, following the Elizabethan era. This period saw a shift towards darker themes, exploring revenge, corruption, and moral decay.

 

Jacobean theatre acted as a subtlesubversive art formbycritiquing prevailing social, political, and moral issuesthrough dark, complex themes and biting satire, reflecting thecynicism and moral ambiguity of the era.

growing mercantile class

Society shifting from feudalism to early capitalism.

 

Mercantile: relating to trade or commerce; commercial. Emergence of new market capitalism – self-transformation possible. Rapid increase in bourgeois wealth – fears of an upstart, aspirational group rivalling the traditional ruling class.

 

New individualism

Political thinking changed: feudal society with its strong social hierarchy had virtually vanished and discoveries in science and the New World, together with increasing wealth from commerce and manufacture, fostered new ideas about value, merit and status, something Edmund articulates in Act One scene 2. Social mobility became a reality: in Elizabeth’s time, gentlemen could be ‘made’ as well as born, and James sold knighthoods for cash. A newly prosperous gentry and commercial class challenged the power of the king whilst the aristocracy divided among itself. Political factions were rife, reflected in King Lear in the dangerous rivalry existing between Albany and Cornwall.

The poor

There were significant numbers of beggars on the street and the first poor law of 1601 aimed to tackle this. This made each parish responsible for its own poor, and parish vestries were authorised to raise a rate to pay for their relief, house the homeless or pay a dole in money or kind to poor people.

 

While Shakespeare was writing King Lear, England was convulsed by a terrifying social crisis. Harvests failed with alarming regularity. There were serious riots in London in 1595, and regional famines in 1596 and 1597. James 1 handed the ‘Poor Man’s Petition’ in 1600. One of the most visible signs of all this was a sharp upturn in the number of people on the streets. Seeing 'poor naked wretches;' would have been normal. Unsympathetic commentators talked of a 'swarm' of beggars. When the government undertook one of its periodic round-ups, the numbers on the streets were startling: dozens could be arrested in a single town over a few months.

 

Economic change in the countryside contributed too: arable fields were replaced with pastures,common fields were enclosed, and some peasants were forced off the land.

madness

The Bethlehem hospital in London was an asylum that housed many of the ‘mad’ or ‘insane’. It was nicknamed Bedlam.

 

In the Tudor and Stuart periods,begging was a capital offence. Beggars could be flogged (or worse) if caught outside their parish.The only people allowed to beg were those legally deemed insane.This led to huge numbers of mad beggars, bothgenuineandfraudulent.

religion

During the 1530s Henry VIII created an independent Protestant state. There was deep suspicion of Roman Catholics as potential traitors, reinforced by the Spanish Armada in 1588 where there was an attempt to overthrow Elizabeth and restore England to Roman Catholicism. The associations of treachery were reinforced by the foiled Gunpowder plot of 1605, when a Roman Catholic attempted to destroy the government of England. King Lear was written in the same year, in a time of uncertainty and unrest.

 

Shakespeare had to be careful in addressing Christian matters -the 1606 Act stood in the way of directly talking about the Christian God on stage.But everybody in Shakespeare's audience would have heard and recognised the play's Christian and Biblical resonances. Everyone would have spotted that the talk of gods, heavens, stars and so forth was code for the Christian God..

Gunpowder Plot

The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, in which a well-organized group of Catholic conspirators installed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder under the chamber where Parliament was to meet, with the aim of killing James, his heir Prince Henry, and the entire government, concentrated royal attention on the threat of Catholic disloyalty. The impact of the Gunpowder Plot reverberated powerfully into 1606. It unleashed a maelstrom of fear, horror, a desire for revenge, an all too brief sense of national unity and a struggle to understand where such evil came from. Such turbulence profoundly shapes Shakespeare's King Lear.

the plague

The bubonic plague killed some 30,000 Londoners in 1603.

 

“Pestilence was rife in the Bard’s time, closing theatres and ravaging life.

 

When Shakespeare became a professional actor, then a playwright and shareholder in a London company, plague presented both a professional and existential threat. Between 1603 and 1613, when Shakespeare’s powers as a writer were at their height, the Globe and other London playhouses were shut for an astonishing total of 78 months – more than 60% of the time.

 

The mood in the city must have been ghastly – deserted streets and closed shops, dogs running free, carers carrying three-foot staffs painted red so everyone else kept their distance, church bells tolling endlessly for funerals – and something similar seems to be happening in thebleached-out world of the play. The text is saturated by images of death, chaos, nihilism and desperation, and everyone seems to feel the chill

The Divine Right of Kings

The Divine Right of Kings is the absolutist idea that a monarch’s authority to rule comes directly from God and that he or she is not subject to any earthly authority.

Unification

Before James became king, Shakespeare was an English playwright. Now he had to be a British playwright. James’s big project was the political unification of the entire island. In his opening address to the London Parliament in 1604, he compared his accession to an indissoluble marriage: “What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife.” The silver medal minted to commemorate his accession acclaimed James as the “emperor of the whole island of Britain,” and his coronation medal hailed him as “Caesar Augustus of Britain.” But the forging of a new identity for James’s “Great Britain” was a formidable ideological challenge.

 

Lear’s dismembering of his kingdom is the negative correlative of James’s destiny to make its body whole again.

the body politic

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the monarch was regarded as the head of the nation, with the people as its body. Thus, any disturbances or problems with the monarch had a profound effect on the whole country. This idea is connected to the concept of the Body Politic.

Sir Edmund Plowden (1518–1585) was a lawyer and legal theorist who wrote about the nature of the king’s two bodies – the idea that there is an abstract concept of the king as well as his physical body – and the relationship between the king and his subjects. Plowden explained that the king hastwo bodies: the body natural and the body politic.The body natural ismortalandsubject to ageandinfirmitiesas anyone’s body would be, but the body politic is ametaphysical entityconsisting of policy and government and is‘utterly void of Infancy and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities’. The two bodies form an indivisible unit in the person of the king.

The Great Chain of Being

In the Elizabethan World Picture, everything in the Universe fitted into three overall classes of existence: – heavenly
– human
– natural. These categories were ranked in order of status and importance. Each category was believed to have a particular role in the hierarchy or ‘Great Chain of Being’ which organised the world into a fixed order, with God at the top, descending successively through angels, men, women, animals, birds, fishes, insects, trees and plants to stones.

Basilikon Doron

In 1599, King James VI of Scotland published Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gift), a letter to his young son Henry (1594–1612), drawing on his own experience as king to offer advice on how to be an effective ruler.

 

James I advises against being a tyrant; for honouring one’s parents; for supporting the poor; for being well acquainted with one’s subjects; for the careful selection of loyal gentlemen and servants for one’s household; against the wife of a king being allowed to meddle in politics; for the active participation of the king in councils in order to be able to govern well.

 

Only seven copies of the published text were printed at the time, suggesting that it was intended for a select private readership of family and nobility. Throughout 1603, the year Elizabeth died and James I acceded to the English throne, a revised text was widely printed. It was also translated into other languages and became an international bestseller.

 

Basilikon Doron emphasises the importance ofunionand the dangers of thedivisionof a kingdom. From 1604 King James struggled with Parliament over his attempt to bring together his two kingdoms of Scotland and England in an act of union.

women and family

Women were believed to be intellectually feeble and unreliable and easily overheated sexually. Belief in women's sexual insatiability reflected a insecurity around cuckoldry and a man's uncertainty as to whether the child he was paying to bring up was indeed his own - fears related to questions of inheritance and keeping the family bloodline pure. The widow either rampantly free or easily victimised, reflecting the standard view of predatory female sexuality and echoing anxieties about overhasty second marriages for women

family

The stress on domestic discipline and the utter subordination of the child found expression in extraordinary outward marks of deference which English children were expected to pay to their parents in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Perhaps ultimate subservience is evident at the close of the play, as all three daughters lie dead on stage, forever silenced.

The Jacobeans sawthe family as a microcosm of the state.Jacobean understanding of the relationship between monarch and country that saw in it an analogy to the relationship between a patriarch and his household.                                            

primogeniture

Deriving from feudal law, primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn legitimate son to inherit his parents' entire or main estate, in preference to shared inheritance among all or some children, a child other than the eldest male, a daughter or illegitimate child or a collateral relative.

bastards

'Bastards' are evil in Renaissance drama, because, being on the margins of the aristocracy, half connected with it, half a product of another world, they have a clear motive to contest the dominant (or 'hegemonic') ideology, which defends a particular, aristocratic, mode of property inheritance: from father to first-born, legitimate son. In the end, the play itself comes down on the side of the aristocratic ideology, represented most obviously in Kent and Cordelia, the very figures of the dutiful retainer or daughter whose loyalty withstands any horror that the hegemonic aristocratic and patriarchal order can throw at them: tyrannical anger, expulsion, and banishment. However, it makes such a good stab at representing the germ of a more modern point of view that we sympathise with Edmund's sense of injustice.

Nahum Tate - rewriting lear

The restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 marked the return of Charles II as king (1660–85) following the period of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II.  The Restoration Period a number of Shakespeare’s plays brought back to the stage but to suit the aesthetics and political tastes of the new age.

 

In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear, leaving Lear alive and restored to the throne. Cordelia and Edgar marry. Tate’s revision- tragi comedy. Order restored!

 

Shakespeare’s Lear: “Too horrible, too comfortless to be enjoyable” (Tate)

 

It’s believed Shakespeare’s original text was not performed again until the Victorian era

tragic conventions

• action focused on protagonist whose fall is not due to deliberate wrongdoing - Lear

• KIng Lear;s excessive self belief and importance (hubris) leads to the error of judgement (hamartia) which brings their downfall

• moment of recognition (anagnorisis) when Lear sees the struggling of the poor and apologises to Cordelia

• there is a calamitous outcome (catastrophe) - a turning upside down of everything. the audience experience a purging of emotion as they see the deaths unfold (catharsis)