Tragedy is great suffering, in three senses of the word great:
The nobility of tragic suffering consists in its combination of courage and inevitable defeat. The tragic hero’s courage is praiseworthy in part because it is futile. The human will to act with conviction and in full knowledge that defeat is inevitable—such determination elicits admiration, sympathy, fear, and amazement. The first words uttered by Romeo upon hearing the news that Juliet is dead are “I defy you stars,” as if such defiance could somehow reverse what appears to be a cosmic decree. His determination to join Juliet in death paradoxically accepts their fate even while dignifying the occasion with a bare assertion of the will. Such a futile assertion is similar to that of a later seventeenth-century poet when he declares that “though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run” (Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”). The image here—of mere mortals harnessing the sun and driving it towards the Western horizon—would be comical were it not expressive of a universal human impulse: to be the masters of our lives, whatever our circumstances.
The experience of comedy, as distinct from that of tragedy, is described by Northrop Frye as one of “detached objectivity,” where the audience perspective is essentially ironic: the characters’ experience is below our own; we laugh at their circumstances, chuckle lightheartedly at their misfortunes as they make their way toward comedic resolution, and invest very little emotion in their predicament.
Tragedy is the mirror opposite: rather than occupying a position below ours, the tragic hero is above us, somewhere between the human and the mythical. Tragic heroes are not gods, but they are supra-human—fictional creations who embody an ideal of dignified response to the adversity they suffer because of some error or character flaw for which they are morally responsible. Othello in his fierce jealousy; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in their murderous ambition, and Cleopatra in hers; Hamlet in existential anguish; Juliet in a star-crossed and death-inflected love that is “as deep” and “boundless as the sea”: these characters possess a grandeur, a tragic dignity, that inspires awe. As Aristotle wrote in the Poetics, our experience of tragedy is one of pity and fear: we sympathize with and admire the tragic hero, but their quasi-mythical stature and supra-human capacity for suffering keep us at a safe distance.
Tragedy is also about the essential human conflict between freedom and destiny. The beginning of tragedy, according to Friedrich von Schlegel, the German Romantic literary historian, is “the condition of freedom,” while the end of tragedy is “the recognition of necessity.” The tragic hero, in other words, is burdened by the knowledge that they are (or have been) free to choose even though they are constrained by a collision of circumstance with their peculiar character or ethos. Whereas we moderns tend to think of character as the accumulation of choices, something over which we have full control (hence the phrase “character-building”), such freedom in the tragic sphere is largely an illusion.
In the great Japanese film director Akiro Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, a brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the hero encounters an evil spirit who prophesies that he, the hero, will murder his way to the top. The hero denies this, fiercely rejecting the notion as an impossiblity, but the spirit laughs at what they call the hero’s “refusal to know his own heart.” The hero, in other words, is directed by forces seemingly beyond himself, and yet these same forces spring from deep within his own psyche. The will to resist is real; but the hero’s character, his peculiar ethos, triumphs finally.
The result of this collision of defeat with dignified resistance is the hero’s spiritual regeneration. For tragic suffering is always accompanied by greater understanding and self-knowledge. In what Aristotle called the greatest tragic play, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the hero’s suffering stems from an unbearable revelation—that he killed his own father and that his wife is also his mother—combined with fierce resistance thereto. Yet succumb to and bear it he does. And though he continues for years to struggle with the question of his own moral culpability, at times denying any responsibility for his crimes, Oedipus nevertheless comes to accept his fate and elicits our admiration for his capacity to endure it.
That our destinies are certain, whatever our efforts to thwart them, is
perhaps best grasped by the Player King in Hamlet:
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still
are overthrown.
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
Such wisdom comes to King Lear only through enormous suffering and loss. The supreme embodiment in literature of presumed entitlement, Lear’s power blinds him to his privilege, and to the frailty of human existence, his own included. Learning this lesson costs Lear everything. But the process of his education, his journey from ignorance to tragic enlightenment, is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest literary achievement.
King Lear plays out the logic of tragic suffering to a nihilistic extreme. Nihilism, from the Latin word nihilum, means “nothing,” and the notion of nothing reverberates throughout the play: negation, annihilation, rejection, absence, nakedness, darkness, blindness, madness, and utter loss. In reading or watching or listening to the play, we follow its characters on an irreversible descent into the abyss. On the way down, the play strips away Lear’s powers, both kingly and domestic, as well as the love of his family, his self-hood, and his sanity. Indeed, we do not experience Lear as a mere entertainment; we endure it as a kind of ritual to which we are called to bear witness.
While the quasi-historical Lear was king of an 8th-century bce Britannia, Shakespeare’s play addresses matters of no little importance for early seventeenth-century England. It was written probably in 1605 and staged shortly thereafter, some two years into the reign of King James I of England and VI of Scotland. James’ predecessor, Elizabeth I, had died childless, and there was much anxiety and unrest over who would succeed her. James thus inherited a kingdom threatened by political fracture over the succession crisis. As his dual title suggests, moreover, the new king ruled over a Britain not fully united, even if his succession to the throne officially brought together two of the island’s national identities, Scotland and England.
Lear at the beginning of his play, then, does something that would have aroused anxiety and horror in Jacobean audiences who were keenly aware that the ancient lands of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were largely independent political entities: he divides the kingdom. This single act, which takes place in the very first scene, proves disastrous, setting in motion a series of events that culminates in the utter destruction of Albion (an ancient name for what we now know as the United Kingdom).
For all its political machinery, however, the play is very much concerned with issues surrounding domestic power and authority, particularly the relationship between parent and child. For largely Protestant England and much of Europe, the domestic and the political in Shakespeare’s day had become intimately related. Fathers were to rule their families as kings their commonwealths, both kingdoms reflecting in miniature the ultimate rule of God over his universe. In this sense the play might be said to imagine the otherwise unthinkable dissolution of patriarchy, a political and social ideology that in Shakespeare’s day was all-pervasive.
But before we make of Shakespeare some kind of proto-feminist, we must recall that tragedy asks us to empathize with its protagonists (from the Greek/Latin agon or “struggle”). Tragic figures are by definition morally deficient, suffering from some fatal flaw (what Aristotle calls the protagonist’s hamartia). But tragedy asks us to see in these figures our own human frailty—to judge their moral failings in light of reflection upon our own proneness to self-centered fear, error, and ignorance.
In virtually all of Shakespeare’s Renaissance sources for the story, Lear is restored and dies dignified, his kingdom intact, and is succeeded happily by his youngest daughter. Shakespeare’s play is a devastating departure from this traditional conclusion: Lear dies of a broken heart, the kingdom is torn asunder, and Cordelia, paragon of familial loyalty and love, not to mention hope for the future, perishes with her father. If the play elicits a powerful indictment of patriarchy, it nevertheless bestows on its central character an undeniable pathos.
So perhaps the central question concerning the play’s titular hero is this: In what consists Lear’s principal failing? What is his hamartia? What is it about Lear’s character, his ethos, that leads to the devastation and loss of his kingdom (a national tragedy), the loss of his family (a domestic tragedy), and the loss of his self-hood and sanity (a deeply personal tragedy), not to mention the terrible suffering of other characters we’ve yet to consider?
The answers to this and many other questions the play raises are far from simple. Addressing them will be our task as we respond to discussion prompts spread out over four classes.
Before we enter those discussions together as a class, I offer below some brief remarks about, and a description of, the play’s plot structure, followed by a list of central themes organized as binary opposites. The idea here is to help us see the play as a thing, an object with a discernible form. Lear, in other words, unfolds in time as a performance, a succession of actions and speech utterances; but it is also a quasi-static object from which we can step back and see the play as a whole.
Comedies typically are constructed around two plots, and our interest consists in discerning their connectedness, the latter established by way of interwoven action, ironic mirroring, or both. Shakespeare’s skill in juggling multiple comedic plots is evident, for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the central plot involving the trials and tribulations of young lovers runs parallel to three other independent yet intricately interwoven lines of action. Part of the entertainment derives from our delight and surprise at the ingenuity with which the four plots come together.
Unlike comedy, according to Aristotle, tragedy must possess a “unity of action,” i.e. a single plot around which all events and dialog are arranged. Shakespeare follows this generic principle in Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and other of the great tragedies. One of the more notable features of King Lear is it’s departure from this scheme. Like a comedy, Lear contains two distinct lines of development, each with its own cast of characters.
The most obvious parallels between characters in the two plots are as follows:
| Main Plot | Subplot | |
| Lear | Gloucester | |
| Goneril, Regan | Edmund | |
| Cordelia | Edgar |
The plots are organized around the disintegration of loyalty and affection among the members of two noble families: that of the king (Lear) and of a senior court official, the Duke of Gloucester. The tragic destruction in each plot is triggered by an error in judgment on the part of the family patriarch: in Lear’s case, his division of the kingdom and a failure rightly to ascertain the true nature of filial loyalty; in Gloucester’s, a similar failure to recognize which of his two sons, Edgar or Edmund, is loyal and loving, and which is disloyal and treacherous. The remaining parallels follow from this basic premise, the disloyal Goneril and Regan being mirrored in the subplot by the equally treacherous Edmund, while Cordelia and Edgar share the distinction of being their respective fathers’ loyal offspring.
Additional parallels obtain among several of the play’s minor characters:
| Albany | Cornwall | |
| Kent | Oswald |
The Duke of Albany, husband to Goneril, the eldest of Lear’s daughters, ultimately remains loyal to the king, while the Duke of Cornwall, husband to Regan, joins in the rebellion against him. Subordinate in rank to Albany, Kent shares the duke’s principled loyalty to the crown, whereas Goneril’s steward Oswald is easily suborned as an agent of his mistress’ disrespect for and defiance of royal authority. Kent is the epitome of the loyal courtier, willing to speak truth to power out of love for his sovereign; Oswald is his cowardly opposite, declining to oppose Goneril’s authority, and joining her in stripping Lear of his. This defiance of the king, unlike Kent’s principled (and costly) opposition to his master’s rash behavior towards Cordelia, is rooted rather in self-seeking opportunism and the desire to curry favor with a leading figure of the new regime.
The play is unified, however, not only by the brilliant character-mirroring and interweaving of the action of its two plots, but also by a set of thematic antitheses that inform the ideological struggle upon which both plots converge. Here is one final chart, a by-no-means-exhaustive list of the play’s thematic binaries:
| duty | desire | |
| loyalty | betrayal | |
| sight/wisdom | blindness/ignorance | |
| sanity | madness | |
| order | disorder | |
| natural law | the law of nature | |
| art | nature | |
| speech | silence | |
| something | nothing |
“Nothing” is Cordelia’s stupendous reply to Lear’s love test, the question of what she might offer in public demonstration of a daughter’s filial affection for her father and king. “Nothing will come of nothing,” declares Lear in response (1.1.85-88). This royal proclamation proves to have been prescient when, at the close of Act 5, the stage is littered with bodies and the kingdom is utterly destroyed. “Such is the breath of kings,” says the banished Bolingbroke in Richard II (1.3.208), echoing an ancient biblical idea: “Where the word of a king is, there is power” (Ecclesiastes 8:4). How is it possible, the play seems to ask, that the quasi-divine figure of a king could speak the destruction of his own authority? If this can be said of the most powerful figure in the land, what about all we lesser souls who find ourselves, like Hamlet, “crawling between heaven and earth” (Hamlet 3.1.128)?
King Lear is without doubt Shakespeare’s bleakest and most pessimistic play. It is also arguably his most aesthetically satisfying, combining an unflinching portrayal of human depravity, intimations of human goodness (however faint), and a language whose variety and beauty are unsurpassed by any other of his works. Perhaps it is enough, then, that the only “something” that remains of King Lear is the play itself.
©Robert Whalen, 2025