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King Lear
Cordelia's older sisters, King Lear's other two daughters, have just lied to the king in declaring their love for him. In fact, they do not care about him at all and simply want to get hold of...
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King Lear
King Lear mistakenly believes the words of love that his two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, lavish on him when he is about to divide up his kingdom and retire. Lear's first great error is to...
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King Lear
In simplest terms, Oswald demonstrates extraordinarily rude behavior toward King Lear. A pronounced example of this rudeness occurs when Oswald refuses to acknowledge Lear's summons and questions...
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Hamlet
I would argue that madness in Hamlet and King Lear ironically allows characters to more clearly understand truth. In Hamlet, Hamlet's decision to feign madness (although, to be sure, it's unclear...
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King Lear
Blindness is a pervasive theme and device in Shakespeare's King Lear. Both Lear and Gloucester, for instance, are blind to the truth when it comes to their children (Gloucester wrongly believes the...
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King Lear
Act III, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's King Lear is absolutely central to the play, and it accordingly employs some of the story's most lyrical language. The most extensive example of figurative...
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King Lear
In King Lear, Cordelia leaves the kingdom because her father, King Lear, banishes her. In the play's opening scene, King Lear approaches his three daughters and asks them to display their love...
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King Lear
In King Lear, there is a recurring theme of blindness and sight. This creates a unity in the text because it is a recurring subject that thematically connects a number of characters to one another....
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King Lear
The gentle, loving Cordelia is a foil to her two greedy, unloving sisters, Goneril and Regan. If Shakespeare had given Lear only the two heartless daughters, it would have suggested that all...
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King Lear
The "heath scene" you're referring to in Shakespeare's King Lear is most likely Act 3, Scene 2, in which King Lear and his Fool wander on a heath in the midst of a terrible storm. This scene is...
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King Lear
King Lear’s daughter Cordelia spoke the truth to him from the beginning. She refuses to flatter him the way her sisters do, so Lear disinherits her: “thy truth, then, be thy dower.” She can...
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King Lear
In Act IV, Scene 6, there is a pathetic and funny meeting between two old men, Lear and Gloucester, who have lost everything because they trusted their children. Gloucester says: O, let me kiss...
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King Lear
Nature and the natural world are important themes in Shakespeare's King Lear, and their importance is especially apparent in Act III, Scene 2. In this scene, Lear and his Fool wander out into the...
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King Lear
While one hesitates to call any Shakespeare character a "caricature," this is an interesting question to consider. I would never call Cordelia a caricature, as she is a fully developed character,...
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King Lear
In King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester’s storyline resembles Lear’s. In both cases, a powerful older man thinks he knows his children better than he does. They turn against their loyal children...
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King Lear
King Lear is a very complicated play. It has two plots and many characters. Lear has three daughters and Gloucester has two sons. Lear's three daughters all have husbands. There are other...
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King Lear
In its simplest form, King Lear is a play about a king who makes a big mistake. He wants to retire, so he decides to split his kingdom between his three daughters. First, he makes them tell him how...
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King Lear
When Lear's daughters Goneril and Regan both break their promises to provide for their father's one hundred knights, his already well-established ungovernable temper causes him to rush out of doors...
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King Lear
If her failure to match her two older sisters, Goneril and Regan, to see who among the king’s daughters could be most obsequious would result in Cordelia’s disgrace and banishment, it was a...
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King Lear
King Lear remains popular today for reasons you've noted, but I will offer another one: appearances versus reality. Lear's flaw is his inability to discern who is telling him the truth and who is...
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King Lear
Both the subplot and the main plot are intended to illustrate Shakespeare's thesis that each generation blindly creates the generation which will take over all its possessions and leave it to die....
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King Lear
In both the main plot and the subplot of King Lear, both main characters are old men with powerful positions in the world. Both of them make the same mistake in trusting the wrong child and...
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King Lear
If we assume the main plot follows King Lear and his three daughters and the subplot follows the Earl of Gloucestor and his two sons, then there are indeed numerous similarities and several...
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King Lear
One obvious difference between the main plot and the subplot in King Lear is the fact that the main plot concerns two daughters (the third being absent), while the subplot concerns two sons. In...
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King Lear
Shakespeare's King Lear is not the story of a single man who is betrayed by his daughters but a story about the universal tragedy of old age--how one generation is inexorably replaced by the...
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King Lear
King Lear is perverse, or we may say tragically flawed, in his treatment of his favorite and most loving daughter, Cordelia. His flaw (or perversity) lies in his inability to distinguish between...
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King Lear
The Fool shows up late in Act I, after Lear has made his mistake and given his kingdom and his power to his two ungrateful daughters. He has also disowned the third daughter, Cordelia, who actually...
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King Lear
Tragedy has certain defining conventions: the hero usually has a tragic flaw, the play generally has a mood of foreboding, the hero experiences bad luck/fate (in contrast to a comedy, where at...
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King Lear
Shakespeare's intent is to show how one generation gradually supplants the generation that bore and nurtured it. The subplot deals with meles, whereas the main plot deals with females. This...
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King Lear
William Shakespeare's King Lear is a play that centers around themes of filial ingratitude. At the beginning of the play, Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. Rather than...
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King Lear
This quote comes from Act 1, scene 4 of William Shakespeare's King Lear as the titular Lear laments that his children, more specifically his daughter Goneril, are inherently ungrateful. Lear...
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King Lear
Albany's final speech makes up the last four lines of the play. With almost all of the play's major figures, barring himself, Kent, and Edgar, dead, Albany says: The weight of this sad time we...
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Death of a Salesman
This is a massive theme in each work, so I will just give you a quick sense of it. In King Lear, the king betrays his youngest daughter Cordelia by taking away her inheritance because she will not...
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King Lear
At the end of Act 1, Scene 2, Edmund is revealing some of his villainous thoughts in a brief soliloquy. He is succeeding in driving a wedge between his father, the Duke of Gloucester, and his...
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King Lear
In analyzing how Lear is an example of how not to parent, my hypothesis would focus on the first scene of the drama. A hypothesis that could explore how King Lear embodies a manual on how not to...
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King Lear
It's fascinating: even after 400 years people still read Shakespeare, people still watch Shakespeare, people still need to see and hear these stories over and over again, even though they know how...
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King Lear
King Lear makes a considerable mistake in giving his kingdom to his daughters Goneril and Regan. They profess their love for their father, stating that they adore him more than any other. The third...
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King Lear
From the beginning of the play Edmund is well regarded for his good looks and polished manners. When his father introduces him to Kent in the opening scene of the play Gloucester seems slightly...
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King Lear
Labeling King Lear as a play of redemption rests in the evolution of the protagonist. It is difficult to see Shakespeare's drama as redemptive given its ending. Everyone dies. However, if we...
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King Lear
Both scenes introduce essential plot elements to King Lear. The opening scene is especially important, as it sets up the entire play. King Lear gathers members of his court to divide his kingdom...
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King Lear
At the beginning of Act 5, Scene 3, the stage directions read: Enter, in conquest, with Drum and Colors, Edmund; Lear and Cordelia as prisoners; Soldiers, Captain. So it was Edmund who took Lear...
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King Lear
King Lear by William Shakespeare is a tragedy written mainly in blank verse concerning the downfall of King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester due to the ingratitude of their children. It was first...
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King Lear
In Act 1, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's King Lear, Lear prepares to divide his land between his three daughters. To determine who gets the most territory, he asks his children which of them loves him...
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King Lear
This scene conveys the poor relationships between Goneril and her husband Albany. The scene begins with Goneril expressing her attraction to Edmund, kissing him and bidding him farewell. When...
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King Lear
The two characters who come to mind are King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester. Lear makes the colossal mistake of trusting the flattery of his two daughters Goneril and Regan. He disavows his honest...
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King Lear
Lear, in Shakespeare's play King Lear, gradually discovers that he has been mistaken about his daughters. The first stage occurs after Lear has divided his kingdom between his two daughters, when...
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King Lear
The significance of old age and death in King Lear represent inevitable lessons that must be learned. While King Lear is foolish in many regards, he speaks words in the opening of the drama that...
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King Lear
In William Shakespeare's play King Lear, both Cordelia and Edgar are offspring who are undervalued by their parents. In both cases, this undervaluing is caused by two factors. The first is the...
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King Lear
I think that the hypothesis about King Lear representing a "manual on how not to parent" is a valid one. King Lear represents some of the worst examples in parenting. While Shakespeare has...
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Hamlet
Perhaps the first question to ask here relates to the original states of the two characters at the opening of their respective tragedies. It is clear in King Lear that the monarch has at least...
