Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.

William Shakespeare, King Lear IV.6-V.3

Many people have a problem with the way Edgar treats Gloucester in Act 4, Scene 6. His father, cruelly betrayed, blinded, and remorseful, is determined to commit suicide, yet Edgar not only continues to conceal his true identity but plays a trick on him (a trick that even Edgar questions the rightness of). Explain Edgar’s actions and motivations.

Edmund decides to act in a way contrary to what even he acknowledges is his nature — mercifully. Why? What meaning can we derive from his attempt to perform one kind and morally justifiable act at the end? Is his attempt meaningful, even though it fails? Can we take comfort or some kind of compensation from it? Does it make the play more or less tragic? Why?

As we have seen, Shakespeare is often bawdy. People of his time did not blush easily, and in some ways 21st century U.S. culture seems prudish in comparison to the earthy English Renaissance. Sometimes Shakespeare uses sexuality for comic effect, and indeed his comedies revolve around sexual pursuit, role-playing, cross-dressing, mistaken identity, and similar tropes that have been good for a laugh since the time of Plautus (again, Shakespeare knew Latin). Some of the more bawdy lines in King Lear have a comic effect, as we have discussed. However, in some ways Shakespeare’s portrayal of sexuality in this play seems both darker and more neurotic. Discuss the play’s depiction of sex’s effect on human motivations.

After providing the audience with a tender scene of reunion and reconciliation, Shakespeare rips everything away from us. Nothing indeed comes to nothing, and the play ends with the sense that life for the survivors will be a merely temporary burden. What message should we take from this resolution? In Aristotelian terms, does the play offer any catharsis? Has a blockage been cleared or guilt expunged in a way that will allow life to go on as it should?

 
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