As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

February 3—open letter

Dear students,

We’ve been reading a play about fathers who cannot see—one who refuses to look at what’s in front of him, another who gets his eyes torn out for finally trying to look—and somehow, you have seen everything.

One of you saw that Lear demands to be treated as father, king, son, and child all at once but never reverses it, never gives what he takes. Another heard Regan command “Give me thy sword” and recognized the echo of her father’s “Give me the map”—saw her becoming the exact thing she spent her life hating. You caught the moment when madness becomes visible rather than implied, when Shakespeare stops hinting and puts Lear’s unraveling directly in our faces. You understood that “starved animals beg for empathy,” that we’re watching men who built their own suffering now rattling at the bars of cages they designed.

Several of you refused easy answers. You held contradictions open instead of collapsing them: Lear is both delusional and kingly, the storm exposes rather than purifies, Edgar is nothing and Edgar is coming back to himself. You saw that the Gloucester subplot exists to prevent redemption from overshadowing cruelty, that innocence doesn’t guarantee safety, that loose ends will never be tied. One of you asked whether Nature and human nature are even separate things when humans are trying to return themselves to the wild. Another noticed that Kent disguises his person but never his character—the only one in the play who doesn’t perform a different self.

You caught theatrical choices that change meaning: how different productions stage the same madness as inflicted from outside or erupting from within, how a director’s decision to let Edgar hear his father’s love could give him back “some hope.” You saw servants killed for defending their masters, sham trials in victims’ own homes, “our power shall do a courtesy to our wrath” announcing that cruelty and authority no longer need to hide from each other.

And you saw the recognitions that come too late: Gloucester feeling remorse while Edgar stands disguised in front of him, Lear discovering empathy for the poor only after losing everything, the man who “slenderly knew himself” finally stripped down to “unaccommodated man” and forced to look.

This is what close reading does. It lets you see what characters cannot. It gives you vision in a play about blindness. You are eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, reading a 400-year-old text about power and family and madness and cruelty, and you have seen into it with precision and courage and refusal to look away.

Keep seeing. Keep refusing easy comfort. Keep holding the contradictions open and asking the hard questions. You’re doing the work that matters.

—Dr. H

From Canvas and Discussions, January:

Izzy – The child not embraced will burn down the village; Edmund bleeding while ignored
Kyra – Cornwall in wet cement, Lear in cracking stone; power hardening and weakening
Olivia – Eyre’s kiss as exposure; impropriety that might shift our sympathies
Alicia – Edmund’s invisible wound; “nature” as the word everyone weaponizes differently
Lily – True friends don’t leave in storms; confused by Kent’s sudden violence
Peter – “The king would speak”—clinging to a title now just air
Ella – “A tailor made thee”; Adam Sandler’s manic loyalty; searching for “the good one”
Kerra – Strategic opacities vs. plot holes; Edgar alone, scraping filth onto his face
Emily – Stocks then, jail now; violence moved from body to soul
Julia – “Nothing almost sees miracles but misery”—suffering as the price of seeing
Mischa – Eyes that burn vs. eyes that comfort; planning to watch multiple film versions
Maya – Lear’s arithmetic of love dropping to zero; empathy for a twisted worldview
Zoe – Pushing back: not recognition yet, but the storm ahead; loss of self, not just power
George – Language alone creating fury; the absurd cruelty of all-day stocks
Anish – Two daughters independently arriving at the same cold lack of love
Edward – Heart shattering into a hundred thousand flaws rather than weep; the absent queen
Max – Edgar as Lear’s godson, Edmund unclaimed; the barely-there crown
Brendan – “No” “Yes” “No” “Yes”—denial as drumbeat; what happens next?
Richard – Fortune’s wheel shifting from expression to prayer; Lear’s Shadow and forgetting

Lear giving away his shell. The snail without protection.
Nothing made from nothing. But the whole play is nothing becoming something, something becoming nothing.
The Fool offering Kent his coxcomb. You’re the fool now.
“Does any here know me?” A man asking strangers to identify him.
Goneril’s womb cursed. Not death—worse. A life of barrenness.
Kent in disguise, loyal. The Fool without disguise, loyal. Only one gets heard.
Cordelia haunting the play from offstage. Absence as presence.
Edmund climbing up while Lear falls down. Inverted trajectories.
The hundred knights as followers. Lear’s Instagram.
Imperatives becoming interrogatives. Commands collapsing into questions.
“I did her wrong” followed immediately by “O, let me not be mad.”
The kingly plural fracturing. “Oh, Lear, Lear, Lear!”
Two kinds of blindness: not seeing others, not seeing yourself.
Pity versus empathy. Pitying someone you don’t excuse.
Dementia amplifying what was already there. Narcissism getting louder.
The dragon’s wrath. Don’t come between.
Truth getting punished. Lies getting rewarded. Then the reversal.
Lear as baby. Lear as ancient. Both at once.
The play as permission to feel something you weren’t sure you were allowed to feel.

“Shakespeare is the most contemporary writer there is,” Jackson told me. “He only ever really asks three questions: Who are we? Why are we? What are we? And no one has ever come up with the comprehensive answer to any of those questions.”

Glenda Jackson: King Lear

Ruth Wilson: Cordelia / The Fool

Jayne Houdyshell: Earl of Gloucester

Elizabeth Marvel: Goneril

Aisling O’Sullivan: Regan

Pedro Pascal: Edmund

John Douglas Thompson: Earl of Kent

Sean Carvajal: Edgar

Previous Shakespeare in this class:

Sonnet 116

Sonnets

How to Quote Shakespear

Anthony Hopkins’ Lear

James Earl Jones’ Lear

Samuel Johnson, 1765

For the first Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles….

A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue….

In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.

August Wilhelm Schlegel, 1835

The story of Lear and his daughters was left by Shakespeare exactly as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristical of the simplicity of old times. But in that tradition there is not the slightest trace of the story of Gloster and his sons, which was derived by Shakespeare from another source. The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue or the denouement must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloster for the fate of Lear becomes the means which enables his son Edmund to effect his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the saviour of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril; and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. It is the very combination which constitutes the sublime beauty of the work. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world: the picture becomes gigantic, and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall from their appointed orbits. The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate, Penguin, 1997, p. 383.

Jonathan Dollimore, 1999

King Lear is, above all, a play about power, property, and inheritance.

Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Jonathan Dollimore, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1999, p. 190.

Suggested questions for last Lear day (also write your own)

1. Strategic Opacity (Greenblatt): Edgar keeps his identity hidden from Gloucester all the way to his father’s death, revealing himself only after it’s too late. Greenblatt talks about strategic opacity—withholding information to maintain power or control a situation. What does Edgar gain by staying hidden? What does it cost Gloucester to die without knowing his son was beside him? Is this cruelty or mercy?

2. Palimpsest: One of you noticed echoes of Oedipus in King Lear—fathers and children, blindness and sight, self-inflicted suffering. But Act 5 diverges sharply from the Greek model. Where does Shakespeare write over the older tragedy, and where does he let it show through? What does he gain by invoking Oedipus and then refusing its resolution?

3. Cordelia dies. Lear dies holding her body. Several of you have argued the play is about characters finding clarity through suffering. What clarity, if any, does this ending offer? Or does Shakespeare pull the rug out from under his own moral architecture?

4. Edmund’s deathbed turn: “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (5.3.243–44). Do you believe him? Does it matter? Can a last-minute gesture redeem anything, or is this Shakespeare showing us that redemption itself is a fiction?

5. One of you asked why we sympathize more with Gloucester than Lear when both were careless fathers. Now that you’ve seen both their deaths, has your answer changed? Does the manner of suffering determine who deserves our pity?

6. Albany emerges as a moral authority by Act 5, but he’s been mostly silent until Act 4. Is his late-stage conscience convincing, or does his earlier passivity disqualify him from judgment? What does Shakespeare want us to think about people who speak up only when it’s safe—or too late?

7. Goneril and Regan destroy each other over Edmund. You’ve debated whether their cruelty was innate or revealed by power. Does Act 5 answer this question, or does Shakespeare keep it deliberately unclear? What’s the difference between a villain and a person who does villainous things?

8. Edgar kills Edmund in trial by combat and becomes—what? The new duke? The new moral center? Several of you said Edgar felt like a blank slate. After five acts, do you know who he is? Should you? What does it mean that the last man standing is the one we know least?

9. “Is this the promised end?” Kent asks, looking at Lear with dead Cordelia (5.3.263). The “promised end” is the apocalypse, the last judgment, the moment when everything is made right. Is this play apocalyptic—does it show a world ending—or is it just showing that the world doesn’t end, that suffering continues without cosmic resolution?

10. Lear’s last words are disputed. Some editions have him dying thinking Cordelia’s alive (“Look, her lips”); others have him knowing she’s dead. Which ending do you choose, and why? Does it matter whether Lear dies in delusion or in clarity? What does your choice say about what you think this play is trying to do?

Come ready to fight for your answers.

“A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” Kenneth Burke

“As I see it, one issue in King Lear is _________________”

“According to sociologists, Lear is really a case of __________”

“According to feminists, Lear is really a case of __________”

“According to masculinities scholars, Lear is really a case of __________”

“According to ________ , Lear is really a case of __________”