King Lear: Writer's Methods and Techniques (OCR A Level English Literature): Revision Note

Writer’s methods and techniques

Strong responses should look beyond the analysis of individual words and phrases, considering how Shakespeare's methods shape meaning across the play. The following sections explore:

• Form

• Structure

• Language

Form

King Lear belongs to the genre of Shakespearean tragedy. It is useful to consider the conventions of tragedy and the ways Shakespeare follows, adapts and challenges them throughout the play. This encourages you to consider not only what happens, but why Shakespeare constructs the tragedy in this way and how it shapes the audience's response. 

Shakespearean tragedies usually include

• A noble protagonist undone by a fatal flaw, often described using the Aristotelian term hamartia:

  • Lear's tragic error is rooted in his pride, particularly his inability to distinguish sincerity from flattery, and his assumption that authority and love can both be commanded rather than earned

  • Lear's suffering greatly exceeds the consequences that might reasonably be expected from his initial error, encouraging the audience to respond with pity as well as judgement

• An escalating chain of consequences set in motion by that flaw:

  • Lear's disinheritance of Cordelia in Act 1 sets off a chain reaction: 

    • Goneril and Regan strip him of his knights, he is turned out into the storm, and his madness develops as a direct result

  • Shakespeare doubles this pattern through the Gloucester subplot, so the audience sees the same structure of misjudgement and escalating consequence twice, reinforcing the idea

• A recognition in which the protagonist finally understands the truth they were blind to earlier:

  • Lear's recognition develops gradually, beginning with his growing awareness of his own vulnerability on the heath, and reaching its fullest expression in his reconciliation with Cordelia in Act 4 

  • Gloucester's recognition is more sudden, and is closely tied to the loss of his physical sight 

• A reversal of fortune, or peripeteia, in which the protagonist's status is completely inverted:

  • Lear moves from king with enormous political authority to a man who describes himself as "unaccommodated" within the space of a few scenes:

  • Shakespeare stages this reversal visually as well as through plot, since Lear is stripped of his clothes, his followers and his shelter in quick succession

• Catharsis, the emotional release Aristotle argued tragedy should produce in an audience through pity and fear:

  • King Lear is frequently discussed as difficult to read as cathartic in a straightforward sense, since its ending offers little sense of relief or restored order after the deaths of Lear and Cordelia 

  • It can be argued that the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia, brief as it is, alongside the deaths of Edmund, Goneril and Regan, still produces a resolution, even though it is limited

  • However, it can also be said that Cordelia's death specifically denies the audience this release, replacing catharsis with something closer to protest at the apparent absence of justice

• A conclusion in which the majority of principal characters are dead:

  • By the final scene, Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Gloucester and Cornwall have all died, leaving Albany, Kent and Edgar to survive into an uncertain future rather than a stable resolution

A Jacobean audience would have understood these conventions well, and would have expected a tragedy to move towards some kind of moral clarity or restored order by its conclusion. King Lear is often read as unusually severe precisely because it refuses this expectation. 

Cordelia's death in particular has troubled audiences and critics since the seventeenth century. Nahum Tate's 1681 adaptation rewrote the ending so that Cordelia survived and married Edgar; Tate's version dominated the English stage for more than 150 years before Shakespeare's original was restored to performance.

Structure

The structure of tragedy

Classical tragedy is associated with several conventions, including:

• Unity of action, in which the events of the plot are connected to a central conflict rather than forming a series of unrelated episodes 

• A protagonist of high status, so that their fall is a fall from a considerable height

• A plot that inspires pity and fear rather than ridicule, even where individual scenes contain dark or grotesque comedy

Shakespearean tragedies generally follow a five-part structure

• Exposition: the play opens by establishing the central relationships and the flaw that will drive the tragedy:

  • Lear divides his kingdom according to a public declaration of love, rewarding performance over sincerity

  • Cordelia is disinherited and Kent is banished for defending her

  • The Gloucester subplot begins in parallel, with Edmund's resentment at his illegitimacy established in the same act

• Rising action: the consequences of the initial error begin to compound:

  • Goneril and Regan progressively reduce Lear's authority and his knights

  • Edmund's forged letter succeeds, and Gloucester disowns Edgar

  • Kent, in disguise, is placed in the stocks, and Lear is turned away by both his daughters

• Turning point: the play's climax is generally identified as the blinding of Gloucester in Act 3

  • This is the point at which Shakespeare stages violence and cruelty explicitly on stage, making the play's physical brutality impossible for the audience to ignore

  • Lear's descent into madness during the storm runs alongside this turning point, so the audience experiences both plots reaching their lowest point in close succession

• Falling action: the consequences of the climax begin to be addressed, and the possibility of reconciliation opens up:

  • Edgar, still disguised, begins to guide and protect his blinded father

  • Lear is reunited with Cordelia and recovers enough sanity to recognise and beg forgiveness from her

  • Albany turns against Goneril once he learns the extent of her cruelty

• Resolution: the play's conflicts are resolved through death, with little sense of political or personal restoration: 

  • Edmund is defeated in single combat by the disguised Edgar

  • Goneril poisons Regan after the sisters' rivalry over Edmund intensifies, then kills herself when Edmund's treachery is exposed 

  • Cordelia is executed despite Edmund's last-minute attempt to have the order reversed, and Lear dies grieving over her body 

  • Albany offers rule to Kent and Edgar, but Kent declines, leaving Edgar to govern 

The interweaving of the two plots

• Shakespeare stages key turning points in the Lear and Gloucester plots in close proximity, linking the two narratives: 

  • Gloucester's blinding occurs in the same act as Lear's descent into madness, and Gloucester's death is revealed not long before Lear's own

• The two plots therefore illuminate one another: 

  • Gloucester's physical blindness invites reflection on Lear's earlier failure of judgement, while Lear's growing empathy for the poor gains additional weight from Gloucester's suffering. 

Where the play resists its own structure

• King Lear resists tidy division into the five-part model more than some of Shakespeare's other tragedies:

  • The reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia in Act 4 appears to move the play towards resolution, but this is immediately followed by renewed conflict and death in Act 5

  • This means the play's emotional trajectory does not move as steadily downward, or upward, as the five-part model suggests

Language

Analysing Shakespeare's use of language means more than picking out individual words. Try to consider language in its broadest sense, including the shifting patterns between verse and prose, and the recurring symbols and images Shakespeare builds across the entire play, rather than within a single speech. Below you will find revision material on:

• Poetry and Prose

• Symbolism

• Stagecraft

Poetry and prose

Shakespeare uses the shift between verse and prose to signal a character's social status, emotional state and command of reason. In King Lear, characters move between verse and prose as their circumstances change, making the relationship between speech, status and psychological state particularly important. 

Blank verse

• Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines, typically written in iambic pentameter, and is generally associated in Shakespeare's plays with high-status characters and emotionally significant speech

• Lear speaks in verse for the majority of Act 1, reflecting his authority and status as king:

  • His command of complex, extended sentence structures in this act reflects his confidence and control, both of which collapse as the play develops

• Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar (before his disguise) all speak primarily in verse, reflecting their noble status

• Notably, Lear's verse becomes increasingly fragmented as his madness develops in Act 3, rather than disappearing outright:

  • His lines lose their earlier regularity, breaking into shorter, more exclamatory bursts, becoming increasingly fragmented, with disrupted syntax, repetition, exclamations and irregular rhythms reflecting his deteriorating mental state

• Lear's frequent use of the imperative, "Come not between the dragon and his wrath," "get thee glass eyes," is itself worth tracking across the play, since its function changes even as the grammatical form stays constant:

  • In Act 1, an imperative from Lear functions as a genuine command, backed by real political authority and immediately obeyed

  • By Act 4, the same grammatical structure survives in his mad speeches, but it no longer commands anything, revealing the gap that has opened up between the form of Lear's authority and its substance

Rhymed verse

• Rhymed verse, in which lines end in matching sounds, is used more sparingly than blank verse in King Lear, and tends to mark moments of heightened, often ominous, significance

• The Fool frequently closes his speeches with rhyming couplets or songs:

  • This lends his commentary an almost prophetic quality despite its comic surface

  • His prophecy of "great confusion" in the "realm of Albion", for example, gives his apparently foolish speech a darker edge beneath the comic surface 

• Rhymed couplets are also used structurally to close individual scenes, giving them a sense of formal completion even where the content of the scene is unresolved

Prose

• Prose has no regular metrical pattern, and Shakespeare often uses it for comic, informal or psychologically unstable speech 

• The Fool speaks largely in prose, which reflects his informal role and allows him to move between comedy, commentary and direct criticism of Lear 

• Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, moves between fragmented prose and broken verse, a linguistic performance of madness that mirrors, and eventually merges with, Lear's own genuine collapse into disordered speech:

  • The audience is invited to notice the difference between Edgar's performed disorder and Lear's real one, even as the two men's language becomes increasingly difficult to tell apart on stage

  • Shakespeare therefore complicates the usual distinction between the elevated language of the nobility and the prose associated with madness or disorder 

Symbolism

Shakespeare builds several recurring images across the play rather than confining them to single scenes. Looking at how these images develop through the language can reveal connections between moments that might otherwise seem separate. 

Nakedness and clothing:

• Clothing recurs as a symbol of status throughout the play:

  • Lear's declaration that "unaccommodated man" is "no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal" gives the image its clearest verbal statement 

• This same image resurfaces later in a different register: in Act 4, Lear's observation that "robes and furred gowns hide all" turns the same clothing symbolism into social critique, extending it from personal loss into a wider argument about how wealth conceals wrongdoing

Sight and blindness:

• Sight functions as a verbal motif from the opening scene, where Kent urges Lear to "see better" long before Gloucester is physically blinded

• This introduces the image in language before the play stages it literally 

• Gloucester's later admission that "I stumbled when I saw" answers Kent's line directly, linking the two men's language across the play and developing the contrast between physical sight and genuine insight 

The storm:

• The storm supplies the play's most sustained natural symbolism: 

  • Lear addresses it directly ("Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!"), making it both an example of pathetic fallacy and something Lear tries to command, tying the imagery back to his confusion about the survival of his authority 

• The storm can also suggest a breakdown in the natural and political order following Lear's surrender of his authority

Stagecraft

Shakespeare's staging choices, not only his language, shape how an audience experiences the play's central ideas.

The storm scenes:

• Act 3's storm scenes presented practical challenges for Shakespeare's original theatre; much therefore depended on Shakespeare's language, the actors and the effects available to the company

• Modern productions stage the storm in very different ways, from minimal effects to full technical spectacle, which can make Lear appear either overwhelmed by his surroundings or still determined to control them

Staging the blinding:

• Beyond its structural role as the play's turning point, the blinding is one of the most graphically violent moments in the play: 

  • Rather than having Gloucester's injury reported afterwards, Shakespeare presents the violence directly as part of the scene 

• Deborah Warner's 2016 Old Vic staging leaned into shock here, having Regan throw part of Gloucester's eyeball into the audience

Disguise and dramatic irony:

• Dramatic irony is also used throughout the play, but its effect is very different from its comic use elsewhere in Shakespeare's work. Rather than generating humour, it generates dread

• The audience knows Edgar is innocent while Gloucester condemns him

• They know Kent's loyalty is genuine while Lear banishes him

• They know Edmund is lying while Cornwall rewards him

• This gap between what the audience understands and what the characters believe creates tension throughout the play

• Kent and Edgar remain in disguise for extended periods, creating dramatic irony because the audience knows their true identities while many of the other characters on stage do not:

  • The audience's knowledge of their identities creates tension across several scenes and adds to the play's interest in appearance versus reality

Sources

• Shakespeare, W. (1951) ‘King Lear’, in P. Alexander (ed.) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text. London: Collins [SME Digital Texts Library edition]

• Brook, P. (dir.) (1971) King Lear [Film]. United Kingdom: Filmways/Columbia Pictures.

• Warner, D. (dir.) (2016) King Lear [Stage production]. London: Old Vic.