English 201-1

Paper 2: King Lear and The Tempest

Due March 15

 

The second paper requires a comparative approach.  All of the topics except the first require you to talk about both plays.  When you talk about both plays in a comparative way, the topic itself becomes especially important.  Most of the topics below specify the subjects you should write about, but the last three suggest you compare characters from the two plays.  These are, in a sense, harder papers to write because you have to analyze the characters in order to discover the significant issues that connect them.  In none of the paper topics will a summary or simple character description result in a good paper.

 

1.  Close Reading.  Analyze a passage of about 25 lines from either play.  The passage may be a soliloquy or a dialogue between several characters, but it should be from one scene, and it should be a passage you find significant.  The purpose of the analysis is to say as much as you possibly can about what the passage means, about what it shows about the character who speaks it and the context in which it is spoken and about why you find it significant.  Do not mere summarize or paraphrase the passage.

 

2.  Ideas of Monarchy.  Lear sought to “retire” from being king; Prospero lost his position as Duke.  What do these plays imply about the nature of power and authority and about their loss?  When Lear describes himself to Gloucester as “every inch a king.” what does he mean?  Do Lear and Prospero forfeit their rights to their political position?  Indeed, can they forfeit them?  What is the meaning of kingship (or a dukedom) in these plays? 

 

3.  Parents and Children.  “He childed as I fathered,” Edgar says of Lear (and Gloucester).  Beyond the simple truths that we know–that parents are supposed to care for their children and that children are supposed to return that care–what are the essential elements of the parent-child relationship that come into play in Lear and Tempest?  Is there a sense of family resemblance among parents and children in the plays?  What are the relationships among the family as love, the family as authority, and the family as inheritance?

 

4.  Generations.  Beyond the simple questions of parents and children lies the larger question of the relationship of generations.  Does the older generation pass down wisdom to the young, or does the younger generation merely reject the outworn pieties of the old?   Can the young lead active and independent lives before the old step aside and let them?  “The oldest hath borne most,” Edgar observes at the end of Lear.  “We that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”  Discuss the plays in terms of the passing (of status, knowledge, and authority) from one generation to another.

 

5.  Doubling Characters.  One noticeable feature of both plays is the presence of characters who are quite similar to each other.  In Tempest, for example, both the Duke of Milan and the King of Naples (themselves comparable characters) have quite nice children but not-so-nice brothers.  In Lear it seems reasonable to ask why Lear had to deal with two bad daughters (as if one were not enough), and the plot of Lear and his daughters parallels the plot of Gloucester and his sons.  What are the functions of this pattern of doubling?

 

6.  Faithful and Faithless Servants.  Both plays contain some servants (or subjects) who are faithful to their masters and some who betray them in one way or another.  Analyze several of these faithful and faithless servants, in both plays.  What leads them to behave the way they do?  What are the values that lead some to be faithful?  What are the considerations that lead others to be faithless?  How is the characteristic of faithfulness connected to other issues of the plays?

 

7.  Lies and Disguises.  Both good and bad characters in both plays tell lies and disguise themselves.  (In Lear, for example, Edmund’s lies force Edgar to disguise himself; in Tempest Ariel is a master of disguise at the command of Prospero, who is himself a master of deceit.)  Discuss the relation of lies to truth and of disguise to identity in both plays.  (You may want to focus on several characters who seem to you to exemplify the issues.)

 

8.  Varieties of Evil.  If you look at the evil characters in both plays, can you distinguish among the various kinds of evil behavior that Shakespeare portrays?  For example, Caliban, we learn in Act 1 of Tempest, had tried to rape Miranda, but none of the other characters of either play, no matter how bad, raped or attempted to rape another character.  What does this suggest about the nature of Caliban’s evil (if we want to see him as evil)?  Can you make similar distinctions about other characters?  Are there particular kinds of action that set them apart as evildoers?  What does this range of evil behaviors suggest about Shakespeare’s view of evil?

 

9.  Magic and Madness.  In Tempest we see Prospero’s magic causing a variety of characters to misperceive the nature of reality itself.  In Lear we find various forms of madness–the real (if temporary) madness of Lear, the false madness of Edgar, the strange consciousness of the Fool.  What magic and madness seem to have in common is their distortion or falsification of reality.  Why is this unreality an important element in both plays?  What can characters with altered consciousness see that others cannot?

 

10.  Lear and Prospero.  Lear and Prospero seem similar as former rulers and as fathers.  Compare the two.  What makes Prospero successful where Lear (at least apparently) is not?  What seem to be the most important similarities of the two, and what do their similarities and differences suggest about the central ideas of the plays?  Why is Lear tragic and Prospero comic?

 

11. Cordelia and Miranda.  Cordelia and Miranda are the good daughters of the plays in which they appear.  What is the nature of their goodness, and how does it differ in the two characters?  Are they simple characters, or do they have some depth and complexity?  Do they change or develop in the course of the plays, and if so, how?  Compare their characters and their functions in the two plays.

 

12.  Edgar and Ferdinand.  Similarly, both Edgar and Ferdinand are good sons in their plays, and one can ask similar questions about them: what is the nature of their goodness, what are their similarities and differences, are they simple or complex, do they change?  By the end of each play, the “good son” seems ready to enter into a position of authority and inheritance.  How has the action of the play prepared them for this role?

 

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