Lear: A Play about “nothing”
•	preoccupied with “nothing” and “naught”
•	parallel between Lear’s disintegration and the ruination of the world/his kingdom
•	division of kingdom begins the play, and it is this action that ultimately destroys Lear
An arithmetic problem:
•	Divides kingdom, expects +, =0
•	Lear is left without an identity; he is “Lear’s shadow” or the shell of Lear
•	It is “the excellent foppery of the world” that we blame the moon and stars for our problems and miscalculations
Edmund
•	Why does he claim Nature rather than law, nurture, or social convention as his goddess?
•	Much like Juliet, in I.ii.22, he plays with names and labels like legitimate and bastard/base
•	Characters in the play move from civil to wild-  they degenerate

•	Movement to the heath-  entering wilderness outside confines of society
•	Edgar’s self-exile part of escape-Tom o’ Bedlam is a naked madman therefore closer to nature, devoid of artifice
•	II.iii.1-20  Edgar “brought near to beast”
•	“basest and most poorest shape” stripping away everything to end with the lowest natural form of man
•	Compare his plight  with Lear’s reduction

•	There is a very thin line btwn man and his/her underlying nature  “As Edgar I am nothing at all”--translation of that line.  WHY??-  he is so emptied and changed he can no longer assume that form
•	II.ii.264 Lear’s  “O reason not the need” speech shows that having more than material subsistence separates us from the beasts
•	Daughters define selves by accoutrements
The setting and pathetic fallacy
•	Lear’s emotional state is reflected by the storm; tempest in his mind=tempest in the world; all characters are disempowered, displaced, spurned
•	procession from court to country is barren, desolate, isolated, sparse:  It emphasizes vulnerability, 
•	The tempest is unprecedented, “Since I was man”  (III.iii.45)
Devolution
•	Return to nature not a positive image; Shakespeare makes some social and political statements in the play
•	Characters are moving toward the end (literally of the play) and to Dover, the cliffs and the end of England
•	Will it be the end of England?
Nothingness
•	Lear has a sense of the injustices done to him
•	“Poor naked wretches” (III.iv.28)
•	“Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel”
•	Lear identifies with other sufferers 
•	IV.i.1  Edgar’s speech:  being at the lowest is tolerable because it can only get better; realistic or idealistic?

•	Immediately after uttering, he meets eyeless father /Edgar’s sense of devastation
•	The worst is not so long as we can say this is the  worst  (ie the worst can ALWAYS get worse)
•	III.iv.101-  Lear:  “Is man no more than this?”
•	without trapping of civilization, “poor, bear, forked animal”
•	Lear sheds clothes to be free?  Shedding dependency, responsibility, consciousness too perhaps, or stripping away false for truth

•	IV.vi.  Gloucester’s suicide and pretend exorcism
•	Gloucester is led to cliff and jumps from nothing
•	Edgar convinces him a devil led him to the cliff, thus saving Gloucester from taking responsibility :  “What thing was that/Which parted from you”  
•	Humanity preying upon itself is the cause of tragedy.  Redemption comes from people
•	At the end of the play, has England the “gor’d state” (l.321) been rescued from the apocalypse?

•	Edmund’s conversion experience
•	V.iii.240  “Yet Edmund was belov’d” -- a recognition/revalation that he was loved; it causes conversion
•	322-323  “My master calls me, I must not say no”  
–	Who is the master?
–	Is he going to death?  To where?

•	“dog’s obeyed in office”-- a dog would be obeyed if it held a political position; a revalation  (NATURE vs. POLITICS)
•	The Revalation vs. Apocalypse:  is the image at the end of Lear the prophetic end? Is anything left to be rebuilt?
•	Think of the play as a microcosm of Renaissance England and its corrupt politicians (W.S. writes 100 years before Swift, but the same problems existed)
Nihilism
•	It means extreme pessimism, belief in apocalyptic end
•	“Edgar I nothing am.”
•	K:  “Is this the promis’d end?”
•	Edgar:  “Or image of that horror”
•	A:  “Fall, and cease!”  (5.3.263-265).

•	V.iii.325-27  “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” --  vindication of all the characters in the play,  implies the worst is past and a lesson is learned  “we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long”
•	Setting up the monarchy at the end; Albany resigns coronet(crown) and restores Kent and Edgar
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