Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest Analyzed
King Lear
This places the play just after the writing of Timon of Athens and before that of Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. King Lear was first printed in 1608.
Influences
Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (second edition 1587) tells of the King of Ancient Britain’s unwise division of his kingdom between his three daughters. Holinshed himself drew on Historia Regum Britanniae, written by the twelfth-century historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth.
In 1605, an anonymous play was published with the name, The True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Leir and his three Daughters. This play had been performed in 1594. In this play, Leir returns to the throne as king of Britain and makes Cordella and her husband his heirs.
From Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene.
Key Points
Justice
King Lear is a brutal play, filled with human cruelty and awful, seemingly meaningless disasters. The play’s succession of terrible events raises an obvious question for the characters, namely, whether there is any possibility of justice in the world, or whether the world is fundamentally indifferent or even hostile to humankind.
Authority vs. Chaos
King Lear is about political authority as much as it is about family dynamics. Lear is not only a father but also a king, and when he gives away his authority to the unworthy and evil Goneril and Regan, he delivers not only himself and his family but all of Britain into chaos and cruelty. Power destroys everyone in the play.
Reconciliation
Darkness and unhappiness pervade King Lear, and the devastating Act 5 represents one of the most tragic endings in all of literature. Nevertheless, the play presents the central relationship—that between Lear and Cordelia—as a dramatic embodiment of true, self-sacrificing love. Rather than despising Lear for banishing her, Cordelia remains devoted and eventually brings an army from a foreign country to rescue him.
Madness
Insanity occupies a central place in the play and is associated with both disorder and suffering. When Lear himself goes mad, the turmoil in his mind mirrors the chaos that has descended upon his kingdom. At the same time, it also provides him with important wisdom by reducing him to his bare humanity, stripped of all royal pretensions. Lear thus learns humility. He is joined in his real madness by Edgar’s feigned insanity. Meanwhile, Edgar’s time as a supposedly insane beggar hardens him and prepares him to defeat Edmund at the close of the play. (Lear is mad; his madness makes sense because of his daughters’ damage).
Betrayal
Betrayals play a critical role in the play and show the workings of wickedness in both the familial and political realms. Here, brothers betray brothers and children betray fathers. Goneril and Regan’s betrayal of Lear raises them to power in Britain, where Edmund, who has betrayed both Edgar and Gloucester, joins them. However, the play suggests that betrayers inevitably turn on one another, showing how Goneril and Regan fall out when they both become attracted to Edmund, and how their jealousies of one another ultimately lead to mutual destruction.
King Lear and Its Critics
Which literary critics and theorists since 1945 have insisted that King Lear replace Hamlet as Shakespeare’s most important, most representative and, to use Kott’s term, most ‘contemporary’?
The Tempest
It is Shakespeare’s last complete play. First printed in the First Folio of 1623.
Theatricality
It is one of the most spectacular plays with a masque, a banquet, and a sea storm.
The Tempest is the fourth and final of Shakespeare’s romances. Along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest belongs to the genre of romance plays.
It combines elements of tragedy (Prospero’s revenge) with those of romantic comedy (the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand), and like one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, Measure for Measure, it poses deeper questions that are not completely resolved at the end.
The romance genre is distinguished by the inclusion of these tragic, comic, and problematical ingredients and further marked by a happy ending (usually concluding with a masque or dance) in which all, or most, of the characters are brought into harmony.
Sources
- Commedia dell’arte.
- Spanish sources: Antonio Eslava’s Noches de Invierno (1609), Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de Príncipes y Caballeros (1578).
- Travel books are much firmer ground. Shakespeare also draws from accounts of the Bermuda shipwreck, an eyewitness report by W. Strachey of the real-life shipwreck of the Sea Venture on the islands of Bermuda.
- The French philosopher Michael Montaigne.
- The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th century and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy.
Text
The Tempest has been the object of editorial care. The division into acts and scenes is accurate. Indications of locality are present. It follows the unities of place and time. The action of the play covers less than an afternoon.
The Setting
The uninhabited island is somewhere in the Mediterranean since the shipwrecked characters were en route from Tunis to Italy. Yet the imagery of the play and the details of the island suggest a New World location.
Characters
Supporters of Prospero
- Prospero: The main character of this play. Prospero used to be the legitimate Duke of Milan. His treacherous brother Antonio stole his title and banished Prospero to a Mediterranean island with his daughter Miranda. A great lover of the arts and in particular books.
- Miranda: Prospero’s daughter. Attractive and young at the tender age of fifteen years, Miranda has lived with her father in exile for twelve years.
- Ferdinand: The much-loved son of the King of Naples. Shipwrecked, but alive, Ferdinand falls in love when he first sees her on Prospero’s island.
- Gonzalo: An honest old counsellor.
Prospero’s Enemies
- Alonso: The King of Naples. When Prospero’s brother usurped Prospero’s dukedom, it was Alonso who recognized Prospero’s brother.
- Sebastian: The brother of Alonso.
- Antonio: The brother of Prospero.
- Stephano: A drunken butler. He attempts to kill Prospero and take the island for his own.
- Trinculo and Caliban (also enemies, listed below).
Island Creatures and Spirits
- Ariel: An airy spirit. Ariel serves his master Prospero well in his many tasks of magic on Prospero’s island. At the conclusion of this play, Ariel is made free.
- Caliban: “a savage and deformed slave”. Hating his master Prospero, Caliban works for him.
Themes and Topics
- Radically opposed ideas: (art/nature, utopia/dystopia, revenge/forgiveness) coexist.
- The Theatre: The Tempest is concerned with its own nature as a play, frequently drawing links between Prospero’s art and theatrical illusion; the shipwreck was a spectacle that Ariel performed. Prospero may even refer to the Globe Theatre when he describes the whole world as an illusion.
- Magic: A controversial subject in Shakespeare’s day. In Protestant England, magic was also taboo; not all “magic” was considered evil. Magic is frequently described as destructive and terrible (black and white magic), whereas Prospero’s is said to be wondrous and beautiful (his magic is white).
- Postcolonialism: Shakespeare may be offering a discussion into colonialism. Different views of this are found in the play, with examples including Gonzalo’s Utopia, Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban’s subsequent resentment. The Tempest has been viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory.
- Feminism: The Tempest has only one female character, Miranda. Due to the small role women play in the story in comparison to other Shakespeare plays, The Tempest has not attracted much feminist criticism.