In the face of this wonderful and terrible work I have more questions than answers. For example:
What is it that Lear wants from Cordelia in the opening scene which she denies him? Is it relevant that Lear is addressing the end of his life, and that she is about to be married? Or that it is such a public, ceremonial occasion? Is there anything wilful-stubborn in her response, or is this the only way of preserving her integrity in the face of Lear's egotism? Does it help to compare the similarly extreme 'plain speaking' of Kent and, to an extent, the Fool - also presented as both morally sympathetic and practically unhelpful, even disastrous?
What genre does this play belong to? The opening has affiliations with folk-tale - the Good Daughter and the Bad Daughters - and several of the characters continue frequently to strike us almost as archetypes, as representatives of symbolic values. The disguisings and identity changes might seem to belong in comedy rather than tragedy, Gloucester's mock-suicide is an episode from romance, the central passages of the play are full of a kind of dark comedy or wild grotesque. We are not prepared for tragedy...
How important are the signs of a new beauty of spirit in Lear? Dare we say that his madness involves a kind of enlightenment, that his suffering (and Gloucester's) goes with spiritual growth? I'm thinking of his fellow-feeling with 'unaccommodated man', his growing ability to acknowledge his own emotions. Or is there something obscene and patronising in such a reflection - a desperate attempt to find some comfort in this comfortless play?
'I'll tell thee thou dost evil'. Where in the play does 'evil' strike us as the necessary word for what we are shown, rather than folly or egotism or the law of the jungle? Is this evil principally a matter of human immorality, or should we think of it more as a horror somehow inherent in the nature of things. How convincingly, and how interestingly, is it embodied in Goneril, Regan and Edmund? Or is Kent right, is Lear the true source?
'Who is it that can tell me who I am?' As his false self-images are stripped from Lear, a void opens up, so that his passion is never wholly purged of the rhetorical, the histrionic. True? Or is there a point (with Poor Tom? with blind Gloucester? with Cordelia?) when Lear ceases merely to act out a part on this great stage of fools, and reaches the bedrock of human nature, beyond all 'sophistications', finally 'the thing itself'?
These are the kinds of questions that we shall be wrestling with in class, while all the time looking closely at the words on the page, working through the play from start to finish.
