2. KING LEAR King Lear explores the issues of: Egotism Madness
Love & Loyalty
The influence of Modernity

3. Issue: Modernity
The MAP is the symbol of the modern world imposed on a world without measurable boundaries.
Lear’s “constitutional monarch” conflicts with the Elizabethan world scene.

4. Issue: Loyalty
Lear’s question “Do you love me?” effectively turns daughter on daughter in a betrayal of loyalty and trust.
Cordelia remains true even though she is banished for her truthful love

6. Issue: Love & Loyalty
Like Edgar, Cordelia remains true to her father and holds the ideal love - one that suffers in patience, is sacrificed for truth and honour to restore order to a chaotic world.

7. Issue: Unnatural behaviour
Lear’s reference to cannibals, pelicans and predatory animals serve as illustrations of the unnatural behaviour of Goneril & Regan as well as that of Gloucester’s son - Edmund.

8. Issue: Justice
When justice is administered or mentioned in the play the essential cruelty and agony of medieval justice is dominant.
“that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.”

9. Justice
Ixion was punished for impatience. How does this image link to Lear?
An image often used in the play… the wheel of fortune and a wheel of torture and suffering.

10. Issue: Justice & Fate
Fortune can tie you to the wheel so as to turn you through fortune to poverty and back on a whim. Fortune is often pictured as a whore granting or refusing favours as the mood takes her.

11. Issue: Madness
Lear’s realisation of the betrayal of professed love leads him to madness and the insights necessary for him, and the audience, to recognise the need to know and see reality.

12. The promised end
When order is restored there can be no life for Lear. Cordelia’s death and the knowledge of his own weakness - as a man and as a Monarch means that he, too, must die.
“Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror?