Summary
Summary Edexcel A-level English Literature: Drama - King Lear context notes
- Module
- Unit 1 - Drama
- Institution
- PEARSON (PEARSON)
AO3 notes for King Lear
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King Lear (set in ancient Britain)(written in 1605/6) AO3 Context NotesLiterary
1. Source Materials
Several sources were important in the creation of King Lear
Shakespeare’s play is a composite piece which merges historical, literary, Biblical, and
contemporary accounts to create an original play (the Fool is completely original though)
Sources include: ‘The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and His Three Daughters’ (1594),
Raphael Holinshed ‘The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles’ (1587), John Higgins ‘The
First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates’ (1574), Edmund Spenser ‘The Faerie Queene’
(1596), Sir Philip Sidney ‘The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia’ (1590), Samuel Harsnett ‘A
Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures’ (1603)
Echoes of the Biblical stories of the Prodigal Son and the longsuffering Job add to the
archetypal quality of the play
The contemporary relevance of the story is also apparent in the case of Sir Brian Annesley, a
rich father of three daughters. He became senile in 1603, three years after making his will, in
which he left most of his wealth to his youngest child. His eldest daughter took advantage of
his loss of wits to contest the will but his youngest daughter, fortuitously called Cordell,
protected him, his wishes, and her own inheritance
2. Early Morality Plays
Medieval tradition of morality plays adapted for Shakespeare’s King Lear
In morality plays, protagonist must make preparations for his own death
Everyman (most famous morality play) illustrates a central doctrine of medieval Christianity:
only by leading a good life can you earn salvation.
King Lear wrenches the plot of Everyman from its Christian framework and plays it out in
a nihilistic spiritual universe, in which the protagonist—Lear—loses everything as
he approaches death, but cannot expect salvation in the Christian sense.
Like Everyman, Lear is progressively stripped of everything he values: his knights,
his authority, his daughters’ care, the roof over his head, and finally his sanity. Lear also
learns which of his possessions he ought to have valued all along: the love of his daughter
Cordelia.
Although the scenes in which Lear is reconciled to Cordelia suggest a partial redemption
for Lear, in the end he loses his daughter as well, and unlike the Christian Everyman, the
pagan Lear goes to his death alone. Shakespeare’s version of a morality play is far bleaker
than its medieval antecedents, as it suggests there is no reward, either in this world or the
next, for leading a moral life. Lear repents of his sins, but to no use. Cordelia, the play’s
single truly moral and kind character, is not rewarded for her goodness, and dies as well.
While Everyman suggests redemption is possible through sacrifice and
moral purity, Lear seemingly asserts the opposite.
3. Jacobean Drama/the big 4
The malcontent is a character type that often appeared in early modern drama. The
character is discontented with the social structure and other characters in the play, and is
often an outsider who observes and comments on the action, and may even acknowledge
they are in a play.
‘Edmund the bastard’ is a typical malcontent. Through his use of soliloquy, Shakespeare
brings us perhaps to a point of near empathy with this deceitful character.
Elsewhere, Jacobean tragedies, in particular, were characterised by increasingly violent
and extreme situations, betraying the influence of classical tragedy.
Shakespeare’s ‘big four’ tragedies are often considered his greatest plays
– Hamlet (1599), Othello (1603), King Lear (1606) and Macbeth (1606).
, Macbeth comes straight after King Lear: is there a continuum to draw between the
nihilism and world-weary philosophising of these two tragic heroes? – Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy
4. Nahum Tate
For much of the play’s history, audiences found the ending of King Lear too shocking to
watch: a version of the play rewritten by Nahum Tate to end happily was more popular in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more closely resembled earlier renditions of
the story Shakespeare borrowed from in writing his version.
In Tate’s ending, the leading characters survive and Edgar and Cordelia are married.
Charles Lamb - In the theatre, he argues, "to see Lear acted, to see an old man tottering
about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night,
has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting" yet "while we read it, we see
not Lear but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles
the malice of daughters and storms."
King Lear was politically controversial during the period of George III's madness, and as a
result was not performed at all in the two professional theatres of London from 1811 to
1820: but was then the subject of major productions in both, within three months of
his death.
The 19th century saw the gradual reintroduction of Shakespeare's text to displace Tate's
version. From 1838, Shakespeare’s original play was finally being performed.
5. Theatre of the Absurd/20th Century Applicability
The nihilistic morality play Shakespeare created in King Lear was extremely influential at the
beginning of the twentieth century, inspiring a genre known as the Theatre of the Absurd.
While it may have been too radical in the bleakness of its vision for Shakespeare’s times, the
play’s pessimistic outlook appealed to writers looking to dramatize horrors of the twentieth
century such as the Holocaust.
Like King Lear, Samuel Beckett’s play suggests that preparing for death is the universal
human condition and extends the nihilism of King Lear to its logical conclusion: not only is
there no salvation, there is no meaning or purpose to life at all.
Early Modern Ideologies
1. Patriarchy
They were seen as property to their fathers and husbands. Once a father chose a husband
for his daughter, her husband would basically own her.
Jacobeans believed that women should be delicate, caring and obey their husbands. Their
main role in society was to marry, produce children and look after the family. Women were
generally oppressed, meaning they had no power or say in any decisions. Any woman that
did not marry or bear children was considered a witch and made an outcast in society.
Women were subservient to men and were unable to vote
2. Primogeniture
King Lear endorses primogeniture—the law which required all property to be passed down
to the oldest male child—by showing the disastrous consequences of Lear’s decision to
ignore primogeniture and divide his kingdom between several heirs
3. Madness/Lunacy/Insight
Samuel Johnson describes the age of Shakespeare as a time when "speculation had not yet
attempted to analyze the mind"
medical model alone is insufficient to describe the madness of King Lear
much of Renaissance medical theory was based on premises from the Middle Ages – 4
humour theory – extreme melancholy causes symptoms like madness – but Lear probably
became mad due to excess of choler
Kent realises cure to choler humour = rest and that Lear’s madness may have been short-
lived had he rest before fleeing
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