What was it about “King Lear” that struck students?
In summary, this is what Manchester’s AA306 group thought. First: what terrible families are on display! Every family that appears in the play is divided and dysfunctional. Of course, Lear’s behaviour towards his daughters is one part of this. Even at this early stage there is something obsessive about the way that he relates to them. This was one of the first indications that Lear was unbalanced, and his concern over the numbers of knights in his retinue was a second. There was a kind of insecurity apparent over both, it was felt.
When Lear became deeply distressed, it was said, he used remarkable language patterns: not only extravagant language but certain rigid formulations of speech. For another student, there was a progressive pathway to his madness: it grew more pronounced and yet it did so in marked stages. Students also asked why madness might have been a dramatic feature in demand, and they thought of other characters who have struggled for self-control: Lady Macbeth, Malvolio, Hamlet, and even Richard II.
For another student, for all the nihilism of Lear’s final state and for all the awfulness of his five ‘nevers’, there was an impressive humanity to be found in him during the play’s final scenes. And on this point, students linked him to Gloucester, whose blindness, physical and moral, was vital to the play. In their final generosity of spirit as much as in their earlier blindness, the two men were alike.
With the coming assignment in view, people also wanted to think about the play’s servants. Students tabulated all the servants to appear in “Lear” and those in “The Tempest”. But who is a servant? Certainly there are the unnamed servants of the blinding scene and also Goneril’s steward. Is the disguised Kent a kind of servant? The Fool? Even, in a kind of way, Lear’s daughters? And this reminded people of Prospero’s daughter, for The Tempest’s ousted duke was also a controlling father. And Caliban and Ariel are rather different kinds of servants to those in Lear.
What was decided was that students might be well advised — whatever view they took — to set out with clarity exactly who they were planning to treat as a servant.
