LIT 251
Prof. G. Steinberg

Response Paper:  King Lear

King Lear is often taught as being about senility and poor judgment on the part of an old man.  As an old man myself, I'm always mildly insulted by this reading of the play.  As a reading, it seems too neat and simplistic to me.  I think Shakespeare is more complex than that.

In the other things that we've read this semester from the Elizabethan age (the sonnets, The Faerie Queene, and Dr. Faustus), the focus has not been so much on social issues as on refining English culture and creating great literature.  Social issues might sometimes come up, but they're not the pressing, central focus.

King Lear, written within a year or two of Queen Elizabeth's death, seems to me vitally focused on social anxieties that came to the fore with the passing of the Virgin Queen.  After all the excitement and optimism of Elizabeth's reign, people were beginning to realize that the good times might not last forever.  People began to think about why communities sometimes work really well and accomplish great and amazing things and why society sometimes just falls apart completely.  Elizabeth had held England together in her iron fist, and James I, her successor, was looking to expand on her technique by developing the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, but there was growing dissension (Puritans and Quakers in the Church of England, Catholic anarchists, Pilgrims who had moved to the Netherlands and were planning to go to the New World).

King Lear seems to ask what would happen if we took away the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us working together in a community.  How would society fare?

Choose one of the following areas as the focus of your response paper:

1. In the reading assignment for today, things get progressively worse for Lear.  He begins as king with pretty much unlimited power and ends as an old man begging his daughters for the right to keep his entourage.  Why are his daughters refusing to allow him his entourage?  What does that entourage represent to them?  What does it represent to Lear?  Why does he want it?  What has Lear lost in the course of the first half of the play?  Some things he has given up himself, but some things have been taken from him.  What does each thing he's lost represent to him? to us?  What is the last thing he loses at the end of today's reading assignment?  Why?
2. Considering that Elizabeth has been dead less than two years when King Lear is written, how are women portrayed in the play?  During Elizabeth's reign, women were portrayed as beautiful objects with power over men's lives (in the sonnets) and as chaste representatives of Elizabeth's – and England's – virtues (in The Faerie Queene).  How does the portrayal of women in King Lear reflect on women rulers, women as daughters and wives, women as objects of love and desire?  Why is there no Mrs. Lear?  Would the play have the same feel if Lear were a woman instead of a man?  Is Lear's masculinity relevant?

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