Essay on King Lear – Personal Journey – (Emma)

Resource Description

‘It is the personal journey of the central tragic figure that lends Shakespearean tragedy its ongoing conceptual significance’
Question: Discuss with close reference to Shakespeare’s King Lear
Intro: The journey of the eponymous character allows Shakespeare to explore the plays existential concerns of universal justice and the questioning existence or non-existence of the divine. In this traumatic journey from the wealth, security and comfort of the court to the vulnerability and weakness of the wilderness, Lear’s journey is of self-discovery lends towards his understanding of people’s capacity for cruelty, the indifference and suffering in the world and allows him to realise his need for empathy and patience ‘as an enquiry into the non-existence of heaven and hell’ stated by Jan Knott. This journey, however, on the surface may seem of socio-political importance, but if left for deeper interpretation it can be convey a philosophical journey of self-discovery simultaneously explored through not only Lear but other main characters in the play, whose own experiences challenge the traditional assumption of the divine through Shakespeare’s representation of a vicious, bleak world without redemption, absolution and direction advocating in the process the stoic ideal needed to endure what G.Knight describes as a ‘ fear that we inhabit an imbecilic universe’ where capricious gods torment mankind.