1)  "Dramatic tragedy" as a genre: We've seen a form of tragedy before in The Battle of Maldon's heroes' zealous defense of the fallen Byrtnoth and their families' honor before the Viking onslaught.  That was a song intended to be sung to their descendants, honoring the fallen and condemning the memories of those who ran away, saving their lives but losing their honor forever. The poem makes sure of both outcomes, and is the social mechanism by which the final tallies of behaviors under the code of honor were accounted. Dramatic tragedy is not a song in the ear, but a living action performed before our eyes by persons whose skills vividly convince us to accept them as raging pagan kings, brain-addled fools, and poisonously rebellious princesses, even though all of them are mere men, not even "gentlemen" (and certainly not women!), and all are liveried servants of nobles like the Lord Chamberlain, the Admiral of the Fleet, or the King, himself. Like artists supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the dramatic actor and author worked under political authority in a tense social space within which both the crown's agendas and those of the commons were given expression. Haunting it all (even today) were the specters of Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and the phallus-waving satyrs of the Greek stage, with whose traditional apparatus the Elizabethan playwrights crafted a new kind of theatre in Early Modern English.  Don't take its existence for granted.   Why did the culture spend so much treasure and time to produce such spectacles of cruelty and horror?  What are tragedy's limits, and how can we tell when a play has exceeded them?  (Samuel Johnson thought this play did.)  What are we to get from reading such a play as a required element of Goucher's English Major, and how might it be different if we watched a live performance of it?  What must the reader's imagination provide and what is it likely to miss?  T.S. Eliot argued (in "The Metaphysical Poets," TLS, 1921)   that after the mid-1600s, English poets and English poetry began to suffer from a "dissociation of sensibility" from thought.  That is, instead of treating thought as a form of feeling and feeling as inextricably connected to thought, the later poets wrote an increasingly cerebral, rational verse.  How might King Lear make explicit demands on its audiences' feelings to change the way they think?  How might witnessing the tragedy bring one to higher consciousness of what it is to be human, and what it is to be monstrous? 

        In addition to the general human responses to suffering that the play might elicit, some historical background might help you imagine what the court audience might have in mind during this time of crisis.  How would king and country conduct themselves following Elizabeth's death in 1603 and the 1605 "Gunpowder Plot" to assassinate the king and destroy Parliament.  Ordinary people, perhaps you and I, could leave the play thankful that our sisters are not Goneril and Regan, our brothers are not Edmund, and our fathers are not Lear or Gloucester.  The king and his court, and politically powerful "city men" of London, might well have wondered whether they lived among "monsters of the deep" (Albany to Goneril, IV.2.49).  If you remember your Conrad, that may have lain within what Marlow (interesting name for a narrator, eh?) may have meant in Heart of Darkness when he looked up the Thames toward Parliament, Crown, and Town and said "And this, also, . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth" (67).

2) Dual plots and genre: The tragedy Marlowe gave the English already had found its typical balance of high style and comic interludes which make the return of tragic action so shocking when it happens. This use of "comic relief" to build and release dramatic tension may have roots in drama as old as Aeschylus' use of Orestes' nurse, prattling about cleaning his diapers when he was a baby, just as the young man has entered the palace to kill his mother in obedience of his murdered father's vengeful Furies (the second play of the Orestia: The Libation Bearers). However, both Marlowe and Shakespeare (like Aeschylus) have thematic purposes afoot in those comic scenes, and it's important not to lose sight of the authors' guileful skill while we're laughing. Look especially at the mix of characters from act to act, as the socially "low" characters become mingled with their "betters" and the moral/political chaos intensifies.  Does the play have "unity of action," that famous Aristotelian neo-classical value, and if so, how are the dual plots unified?   (The other neoclassical "unities" were character [i.e., tight focus on one character], place [in the most famous cases, only one place], and time [again, in the most famous cases, a single day].)

          Those who see Marlowe as a "precursor" to Shakespeare, a true "upstart" whose short career didn't enable him to develop dramatic tragedy to its most sublime perfection (i.e., the Shakespeare worshipers) ought to compare their use of spectacular violence. Look at the scene in which the Horse Courser pulls off Faustus' leg in comparison with Cornwall's barbarous optical surgery on Gloucester, perhaps the most notorious instance of such violence in Shakespeare (though not in Elizabethan-Jacobean theatre--ask Jeff Myers!). Each poet uses violence against the body symbolically, just like Sophocles did when Oedipus blinded himself, but unlike the Greek poet, they obeyed no tacit prohibition against showing such violence on stage. Compare that with the modern debates upon the uses and effects of violence in modern cinema and television--are there good reasons for showing it, and can it be abused?

3)  Modern and Jacobean responses to characters: The play has been thought imperfect because of the ferocity of Lear's rage, the bleak hopelessness of his end, and the absence of any reward for the good characters, though the bad are punished. Aristotle taught, and the English neoclassicists believed, that tragedy was the fall of a great man from high social position into catastrophe through some kind of common human flaw. Tragic audiences are supposed to identify with the protagonist's plight, and to be moved to pity and terror at his fate. However, some might argue that we can't easily identify with Lear because of his outrageous temper, his cruel testing of his daughters, and his arrogant inability to accept facts (e.g., his strange debate with Kent about the cause of Kent's being put in stocks, II.4.11-24). Others find Cordelia too prim and coldly virtuous to arouse strong sympathies as she shares her father's doom. Readers who react this way tend to read Regan and Goneril with a touch of sympathy as daughters driven to savage reaction by their father's behavior, and they sometimes find Edmund's choice of Machiavelian villainy understandable in light of Gloucester's crude jesting about the Edmund's mother and the boy's bastard birth. Edgar, like Cordelia, seems at first too gullible, too confident in his own secure state in the world, and in need of being shaken up. Does the king's pagan violence tempt us to imagine the enormities we might be capable of if not restrained by our democratic civility? Could the daughters' claims of motivation perhaps remind us of our own capacity for self-justification in quarrels when familial rivalries and our own egos urge that defense? Could the Edgar-Edmund problem be a reflection of our own discomfort with goodness and our inability to forgive the casual indignities of ordinary life, treasuring up our outrage until time offers opportunity for revenge?            Jacobean audiences would have been likely to react more to Regan's, Goneril's, Cornwall's, and Edmund's open espousal of Machiavellian political logic.  The Jacobean theater was fond of watching as the deceptive, ruthless "machiavel" laid traps for unwary characters who espoused more traditionally "noble" values like loyalty, love, honor, and trust.  While the machiavels usually were brought down by the end of the fifth act, the heart of the play was given over to watching them behave badly, but successfully, destroying the society around them.  What does this mean about the social forces at work in early seventeenth-century London?  How might the courtiers or city folk be motivated to flock eagerly to such dramas?  Can you see anything in modern entertainment history which resembles this phenomenon?

             Shakespeare's contemporary audience would have had a far different response to Cordelia's death in Act V because the two versions of the plot with which they might have been familiar both allow Cordelia to survive the battle with her sisters.  The standard version of how Cordelia dies is quite different, as we can see in Higgins, The First parte of the Mirour for magistrates : containing the falles of the first infortunate princes of this lande : from the comming of Brute to the incarnation of our sauiour and redemer Iesu Christe.  Imprinted at London by Thomas Marshe. Anno. 1574. Cum Priuilegio  PR2199 .M57 1574  "The contentes of the Booke" with "Cordila" chapter 10 in context  How might this affect what Shakespeare was attempting to achieve with Lear's attempts to determine whether Cordelia was dead or not, beginning with "She's gone forever! / I know when one is dead, and when one lives; / She's dead as earth.  Lend me a looking-glass; / If that her breath will mist or stani the stone, / Why, then she lives" (V.iii.259-63).

5)  Pagan characters on a Christian stage: None of Shakespeare's audience would have considered openly espousing even the mildest of doubts about the truth of revealed Christian religion. Christopher Marlowe was investigated by the Star Chamber Court (sort of the FBI and HUAC, combined) merely on the rumor that he made statements in favor of atheism and homosexual love. However, Humanism and English translations had exposed a larger audience of English readers to the wisdom of Greek and Roman pagans whose polytheism we see reflected in Lear's use of oaths to Apollo and Jupiter (e.g., I.1.161, 180). How would the Christian English audience understand the world-view of a pagan king, and what difference does that make in the plot? Some authors manage to invoke Christian themes like charity, divine providence, sin, and final judgment after death, by drawing upon pagan notions from various sources which early Christian thinkers found compatible with their doctrine. Though Cordelia and Edgar get to articulate some of  these "Christianizing" pagan notions, they do not succeed in Lear's world.  In effect, we're shown the reigning moral doctrines of Shakespeare's time as they spectacularly fail to control anarchy and evil.  Does this increase our capacity to identify with Lear if we are atheists or agnostics or believers in another religion, or does it diminish it if we are Christians?

6)  Playing Lear at Court, at the Globe, or at Blackfriars?--  By the time Lear was first produced, Shakespeare had three possible stages in mind.  The play's premiere was before the royal court, but the open-air stage at the Globe would have been the great popular venue for those who could afford only one or two pennies admission, and the upscale, indoor theater at Blackfriars would have offered a radically different environment from either the respectful austerity we might imagine at James I's court, or the rowdy populist environment of the Globe.  Click here for a 1-minute video in which Maynard Mack (Yale U.) uses a model to illustrate the Globe's stage position relative to its audience.  (Link requires Goucher network firewall access via VPN or on-campus use.)  Click here for Annina Jokinen's Luminarium web page illustrating and explaining the Blackfriars' indoor theater.  During several periods in its history as a playhouse, this former monastery hosted a theater company of child-actors who competed with the adult troupes performing at the outdoor theaters.  Performance at Blackfriars would have closely resembled court performances.  Think about how this intensely intimate setting would influence staging of any scene in this play.

7)  Why do we love Edmund?--  OK, you may hate him, but many readers report his refreshing directness about his ambition and his willingness to do whatever he must to succeed reminds him of modern anti-heroes who, born disadvantaged but struggling to better themselves, turn society upside down to get what others were born possessing.  Audience affection for Edmund may be mingled with severe disgust when he betrays his brother and father, but even in his dying moments he seems capable of turning to the good (making him "round" rather than a purely flat Machiavellian).  Contemporary audiences might have seen in him a very familiar type of person they had met at court, one we met in a previous reading where he seemed an admirable sort.  Castiglioni/Hoby's The Courtier.  Count Canossa says: "so shall our Courtier steal this grace from them that to his seeming have it, and from each one that parcel that shall be most worthy praise . . . [And] there were some most excellent orators which among other their cares enforced themselves to make every man believe that they had no sight in letters, and dissembling their cunning, made semblant their orations to be made very simply, or rather as nature and truth made them, than study and art, the which if it had been openly known would have put a doubt in the people's mind, for fear lest he beguiled them.  You may see then how to show art and such bent study taketh away the grace of everything."  How might Edmund's career be understood as a commentary upon the courtly practice Stephen Greenblatt has called "Renaissance self-fashioning"?  Which are the characters who cannot "self-fashion" while appearing to be "natural," and do you see any who learn to do so in the course of the play?  Do you see any who try to "self-fashion" but are detected in the act of doing so?  What is the penalty for that failure to self-fashion or that detection in this play?  For a consummate display of Edmund's sprezzatura, see Act 1, Scene 1, when this bastard son responds graciously to his father and to Kent just after hearing his mother publicly described as sexually pleasing and hearing his own future dismissed as a life of permanent exile.

8)  Why does Kent hate Oswald?--While serving Lear in disguise as "Caius" after his banishment in I.1, Kent often subjects Goneril's servant, Oswald, to verbal and physical abuse.  In fact, Kent's dislike of Oswald drives him to titanic rages similar to those Lear suffers from when thwarted by his daughters.  Many a scholar has worked to decode the masculine/feminine and father/daughter language with which Lear reveals his psychological loathing of Goneril's and Regan's behavior, but few pay similar attention to Kent's language when insulting Oswald.  Even in his first insults ("base football player"??), Kent invokes "estate" (ME) or "class" (ModE) values to denigrate the servant for acting "above his station."  Especially in the extended "flyting" or "doin' the dozens" speech in II.2, and in his interrogation by Albany, Kent describes Oswald in ways that expose courtiers' anxieties about social mobility.  Think about Hoby's translation of Castiglioni, especially Count Canossa's strategy for "stealing graces" from one's superiors, as a recipe by which a low-born man like Oswald might hope to rise, by service, to the heights of the aristocracy.  Edmund actually accomplishes this feat, for a while.  What exactly are the behaviors with which Kent attempts to associate Oswald, and what makes them socially shaming for an upwardly mobile courtier-servant?   If you are interested in Shakespearian English insults, it's a skill you can learn with practice.  Performers at "Renaissance Faires" routinely learn to produce these learned, paraphrastic insults according to forumlae.

9)  Quarto vs. Folio?--  Since serious literary scholarship took up the study of Shakespeare's plays in the nineteenth century, scholars have debated the value of the "quarto" editions of the plays as additions to, or even replacements for, the versions recorded in the "First Folio" of Shakespeare's collected works, published by friends in 1623, after his death in 1616.  Briefly, quartos are smaller, cheaper books (1/4 the size of folios, about modern paperback novels), and they were printed without Shakespeare's permission to make money for the printers and for those who sold them some version of the plays soon after they were performed.  Suspicion falls on actors (since some get certain parts exactly the same as the folio and others not so well), and on hired scribes sent by the printers to take dictation in the audience.  Are quartos always worse editions than the folio?  The quality of drama in performance sometimes can be better than that in printed editions, and actors sometimes "ad lib." lines which improve their parts.  However, heard speech often is misunderstood, which leads to obvious corruptions in the quarto versions of the plays.  Lear is especially puzzling when we compare quarto and folio editions.  (See the Norton introduction--they present elements of both editions!)  If you are working on a specific passage, why not check the quarto edition at the British Museum web site or read an edited version (somewhat clearer!) and see what you find?  If it differs from the Norton version, check the "First Folio" edition of Lear and see whether they have decided to use its version of the passage, instead.  What are the consequences of using either edition?  Does one change your reading of plot or character?  Do you suspect any lines of dialogue might have been improvised?