Blog 09: King Lear

In today’s blog, the focus will be the next of our A Level texts: Shakespeare’s King Lear.

With all of these blog posts, I’ll be highlighting three important things to consider to elevate your exam responses.

Key Character

Cordelia. Lear’s downfall is a direct result of his failure to ‘see better’, as Kent puts it, over his (Kent’s) insistence that Cordelia is in the right. His (Lear’s) misunderstanding about the worth of his elder daughters’ protestations and Cordelia’s honesty — linked to the hubris that he shows about having his ego stroked — leads to his tragic end.

Key Theme

Sight. The aforementioned quotation underlines this, but it is not the only imperfect sight in the play: most obviously, Gloucester’s blinding is a graphic literalising of this metaphor, and the fact that many of the play’s results derive from a failure in the older generation’s sight.

Key Quotation

‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave’, Lear moans when Cordelia wakes him, having rescued him at the end of the play. He believes that he deserves to be dead for what he has done; most heartbreakingly, he is taken from this ‘death’ by the one person he wronged the most, and whom he thinks would be most justified in shunning him. One of the most beautiful lines in Shakespeare.

📌 If you want more of this focus on character, theme, language, and context to prepare you for your exams, get in touch.