Lear upheaval essay plan

Question 1

Family language

Answer 1

• Cordelia: I love your majesty According to my bond, nor more nor less. (bond- legal and familial, aristocratic, historical, family- connection)
• Susanna and Judith never taught to read- lack language to relate to him, language is the reason for his strangerhood
• ‘nothing can come of nothing’
  -‘virtual stranger’- Kahan

Question 2

Family role-play

Answer 2

• ‘Come, lets away […] We two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage.’
• ‘Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,’
• ‘She’s gone for ever.’
• ‘role-play’ ‘function of philosophy’- Kahan
• experimenting- what would have happened had he stayed?
• father reinstated as the head of the household ‘honour thy father’

Question 3

Economy context and criticism

Answer 3

• Elizabeth condones pirates, James gives away titles
• entrepeneurial, mercentile culture begins
• aristocracy usurped
• economic shift -> social shift
• feudal aristocrats- inherent value, fixed hierarchy
• emerging capitalist merchants- market exchange, individual ambition, market value, social mobility
• Marx believes that the economic base influences the social superstructure

Question 4

Economy quotes

Answer 4

• when she was dear to us we did hold her so, but now her price is fallen’
• ‘no blown ambition doth our arms insigh/but love, dear love, and our father’s right’
• ‘my dimensions are as well compact’ ‘baseness? bastardy? base base?

Question 5

Law Lear’s view criticism

Answer 5

thinks that ‘nature supports […] his decrees as king’- Cantor

Question 6

Law context

Answer 6

• contemporary legal conflict
• absolutist monarchical rule, upheld by strong rulers like Elizabeth, James’s ‘True law of Free Monarchies Revealed- people and god can disapprove, but not change
• common law (defended by prominent contemporary lawyers such as Edward Coke), rise of stare decisis (legal precendent)

Question 7

Law quotes

Answer 7

• fake trial scene ‘There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.
• Tom is ‘most learned justicer’
• commands nature ‘drench the steeples’
• ‘crack nature’s mold, spill all germens at once.’