Lear’s fool is one of the great creations in the history of the stage. He is a kind of comic Cassandra: he is genuinely hilarious, but like the Trojan seer Cassandra he speaks the truth about the past, present, and future while being neither understood nor believed. In addition, he is evidence of Shakespeare’s unmatched (and rarely approached) understanding of language. Shakespeare simply pays more attention to words than anyone else, before or since, with the possible exceptions of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (whose works are quite different from his). Take any of the fool’s speeches and analyze it as a linguistic tour-de-force: look at the puns, the metaphors, and all the other linguistic tricks.
What is the role of comedy in this play? In the midst of Shakespeare’s most disturbing, nihilistic tragedy, we find many comic moments, whether funny lines or physical humor, even slapstick. Indeed, one major difference between Shakesperean tragedy and Classical Greek tragedy is that Greek tragedies tend to maintain a single tone throughout. Greek tragedies are consistently tragic; their playwrights did not have any sense of the concept of comic relief. Even that term is problematic: I do not think that the comedy in King Lear actually relieves us of anything. So again — what function does the comedy serve? How are we supposed to react to it?
Goneril and Regan are also villains in this play. Why do they act as they do? Can you conceive a way to justify their actions? (For an actor, this is an important step in taking on a role: to play a character whose actions you cannot justify even to yourself is an almost insurmountable obstacle.) What distinctions can you make between them, and is distinguishing between them worth the effort?
In rejecting the conditions Goneril and Regan set for continuing to stay with them, Lear exposes himself — quite literally, as by tradition the actor playing Lear is naked or nearly naked in this scene — to the storm, or more broadly to nature. He has been driven mad, but his madness contains a wisdom, or at least a perception, that his sanity did not. Discuss this scene and its thematic implications for the play.
Most people consider Aristotle the first important literary critic. Shakespeare was certainly familiar with his basic principles, and mentioned or referred to Aristotle on a few occasions in his plays. (Although The Poetics was not translated into English until 1623, it was available in a Latin translation, so even if we take Ben Jonson’s comment that Shakespeare did not know Greek at face value, Shakespeare could have read Aristotle in translation.) The key attributes Aristotle defines in this section of Poetics — catharsis, recognition, peripeteia, hamartia, and so on — remain fundamental to literary analysis. However, playwrights have never felt compelled to restrict themselves to strict observance of Aristotelean principles. In what ways so far does King Lear follow Poetics, and in what ways does it deviate from the rules?