King Lear context

Aristotle

Tragedy in theatre stemmed from arisotle

Tragic theatre

Tragic protagonist or hero

suffers a serious misfortune

First performance of King Lear

1606

Monarch

James I was the king in the jacobean era

Katherine O’Mahoney on suicide

The cultural values toward suicide in the seventeenth century - unforgivable. “Nothing is more damnable,nothing more ungodly than for a man to slay himself”

To a seventeenth century audience - suicide was the worst sin to commit. Goneril achieved the status of the ultimate villain&sinner

Goneril’s damnation

viewed as a punishment from God

King James’ book

Basilikon Doron,1599 he wrote a book to his eldest child to not split up his land between his children

King lear - "That future strife may be prevented now" dramatic irony

what could this play be described as

A nihilistic play

Foakes

Lear is a “pathetic senior citizen trapped in a hostile environment”

Battenhouse

sees Cordelia as “Christian“

Dollimore

the play is about “Power, property and inheritance”

redemption

in redemptionist interpretations Cordelia was seen primarily as an agent of Lears regeneration and idealized as a saintly figure

embodiment of love

Foakes

Danby on Cordelia

perfection of truth justice charity

By the mid twentieth century

the play began to be staged with a stronger emphasis on the harshness and violence of its world

Cinderella

It is easier to present cordelia as if she is a cinderella figure

Incest

Alternatively Lear may be seen as a harbouring a suppressed incestuous desire for cordelia

Lear as a dramatic rewriting of Job

Where Job maintains faith in God despite suffering, Lear undergoes a crisis of faith, crying out into a universe that seems empty. Shakespeare secularises the Job narrative to examine human, rather than divine, responsibility for suffering.

Lear becomes a Job-figure in a world absent of the God that comforts Job.

Job vs Lear’s nihilistic ending

Job's suffering ends with restoration; Lear’s ends with the death of Cordelia.
This suggests Shakespeare rejects the comforting providence of Job’s conclusion.

The ending of Lear confronts the audience with a world that lacks the divine comfort seen in the Book of Job - likely a warning against disrupting the natural order

Edmund - how does he counter the book of Job

Job suffers innocently; Edmund thrives wickedly. Edmund’s success is a challenge to biblical justice narratives.
Jacobeans saw this as disturbing: it suggests a universe where virtue does not guarantee reward.

“Now gods, stand up for bastards!” — a blasphemous parody of Job’s dependence on God.

succession crisis

The play reflects anxieties about:

• dividing kingdoms

• unstable succession

• fears of civil war (still culturally present after the Wars of the Roses)
  Lear’s rash division of Britain mirrors contemporary anxiety about James I’s kingdom dissolving into factionalism after his death.

contrasting worldviews

The play stages a clash between two worldviews:

• Lear’s old, feudal, providential belief in a morally ordered ‘Nature’

• Edmund’s new, proto-scientific, amoral view of Nature as appetite and self-interest

A* point:
Edmund turns “Nature” into a secular deity of self-advancement, revealing the ideological fractures of early modern England.

social disorder

Popular in early 17th-century political culture: carnivals, pamphlets, and sermons describing the fear that hierarchy could collapse.

Lear enacts this metaphorically:

• servants beat masters

• children overthrow parents

• the king becomes homeless

• the Fool becomes the wisest voice
  The play embodies the period’s nightmare vision of inverted hierarchy — a society where symbolic order disintegrates.

Shapiro

‘In the past, Shakespeare had tended to keep clowns and kings apart this time he would force them together, creating an unusually intimate and endearing bond’

(Dusinberre)

‘Lear invites dissent from misogyny and patriarchy’

A coin

A coin minted in 1604 bearing the phrase Faciam eos in gentem

unam - I will make them one nation.
Links to scene 1 - splitting up the kingdom

King James speech

first speech to parliament in 1603

What God hath conjoined let no man separate. I am the husband and-the whole isle is my lawful wife;

Links to splitting up the kingdom

Daemonologie

James’s book on witchcraft, Demonology, [was] first published in Edinburgh in 1597.

performing for the King

In 1603, Shakespeare’s players received royal patronage become the King’s Men. King Lear

was first performed on St Stephen’s day (boxing day), for the king, in Whitehall.

Succession securing

‘James eagerly sought the political union of England and Scotland, a marriage of the two kingdoms’ (Shapiro).

The true chronicle of history

1594

Shakespeare’s source text, King Leir, by an unknown Elizabethan author, was, like many plays of the 1590s, fixated on the issue of royal succession. When reworking the story for Jacobean theatregoers Shakespeare gave it contemporaneous update. King Lear’s questions about national identity (it is the first Shakespeare play to feature th word “British”) and the “division of the kingdom” would have been familiar to an audience struggling to adjust to a new Union of Crowns under James I. (William Moore)

jealousy

‘In Leir, the elder sisters’ jealousy is directed against Cordelia, who they fear will marry before them.