Comments on the Rhetoric of
Shakespeare's King Lear

(under construction)

King Lear: Draft Texts of Quartos and Folio
(Internet Shakespeare)

TheTragedy of King Lear (annotated)

"William Shakespeare's King Lear,"
by Jeremy Bandini
____________________

SOURCES

Legend remembered Lear as a pre-Christian warrior king in what is now southwest England. This area now includes Cornwall (origin of cornish game hens.) In the old story, Lear asked his three daughters whether they loved him. Two claimed to do so extravagantly, while the third said she loved him only as a daughter should. Lear disinherited the honest daughter. The story appears elsewhere in world folklore; there is an Eastern European version in which the honest daughter says she loves her father as much as she loves salt. Lear went to live with his first daughter, bringing a hundred followers. She demanded that he reduce his followers to fifty. Lear then went to live with the other daughter, who reduced the
number to twenty-five. Lear went back and forth between the daughters until he was alone. Then the third daughter raised an army, defeated the other two, and restored him to his kingdom. (The story appears in
Holinshed, who adds that Cordelia succeeded her father as monarch and was deposed by the sons of her sisters.) This tale about how actions speak louder than words had recently been played on the London stage in
"The True Chronicle of King Leir." We have seen the essential story once again in the Japanese Ran, and more recently in A Thousand Acres, an intelligent feminist tale, with the two older daughters as incest survivors who have spent their lives cajoling a crazy, abusive father and protecting their youngest sister. Grigori Kozintsev's 1969 Russian version is called "Korol Lir" (available by calling 1-877-884-2402). A bit of the fourth act made it into the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" for some reason.
--from "Enjoying King Lear," by Ed Friedlander, M.D.
________________________

"Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper"

________________________

"'Is This the Promised End?': The Tragedy of King Lear,"
by Joyce Carol Oates
(Originally published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 1974.  Reprinted in Contraries.)

_______________________

"Lear's Lapse: Foreshadowings in King Lear I.i,"
by Joseph "Chepe" Lockett

"Lear's dialogue with Cordelia on "nothing" introduces yet another theme in the play's imagery, echoing, among other scenes, some of his later conversations with the Fool (I.iv.130 "Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?") and others. Indeed, King Lear is, in many ways, about "nothing." Regan and Goneril seem to offer much in the beginning, but after whittling down the number of Lear's knights, they leave him with nothing, and in the end their "natural" affection comes to nothing as well. Lear is progressively brought to nothing, stripped of everything -- kingdom, knights, dignity, sanity, clothes, his last loving daughter, and finally life itself."
_______________________

Passage Analysis of King Lear 5.3
(University of Toronto)
_______________________

Web Resources for William Shakespeare's King Lear
(Rutgers)
_______________________