Introduction of king Lear

[Patient]

Lear, once all-powerful, gives away his kingdom to his daughters Goneril and Regan, yet still demands of them unquestioning love and absolute obedience.

[Patient]

But both daughters abuse him cruelly. He falls from the condition of king to that of the most wretched beggar, and in the storm on the heath he experiences a vision of humanity at its' lowest and most elementel:"the thing itself. Unaccommodated man".

[Patient]

Through his suffering he recongnises that he has"ta"en / Too little care" of the plight of the poor, and he learns the value of love and forgiveness, expressed through his youngest daughter Cordelia whom he had angrily banished at the start of the play.

[Patient]

But in Shakespeare's bleak ending, although Lear is reunited with Cordelia, he sees her murdered. He dies, but whether in despair or hope that Cordelia lives, the aoudience is left to decide.

[Patient]

King Lear has been variously described as a folk tale similar to Cinderella, as resemebling a greek tragedy in it's depiction of physical and emotional suffering, as a christian drama in which Lear is finally redeemed. It has also been interpreted as a drama that comments critically on the hierarchy of the Jacobean state, on patriarchy, on king James, belief in his divine right to rule, and on the political anxieties that characterised the end of queen Elizabeth's reign: fears of civil war and of the division of the kingdom.

[Patient]

King lear poses an abiding question: Why people pay to see a play that depicts human suffering, in which the innocent die, and justice seems thwarted? Many critics answer that it is because King Lear is the supreme example of Shakespeare's tragic genius. But they are sharply divided about the nature and causes of the tragedy.

[Patient]

THEY AGRUE THAT THE PLAY PORTRAYS HOW HUMAN DIGNITY IS REDUCED AND ASSAULTED, BUT ALSO SHOWS THE process of restoration and the POWER of love.