Hierarchical collection of pages (posts) for King Lear, including material for McKellen film, the play itself, background on the play, creative engagement with the play, educational material for teaching the play, and ways to have fun with the play.
Leir meditates alone on his plan to marry off his daughters, unaware that they know his plans. He admits some indefinite apprehension, but his daughters arrive “to rid me of this doubt.” Alluding to the near prospects of his death, he asks which daughter loves ...
Gonorill and Ragan complain about the impertinence of Cordella - so sober, courteous, demure, modest, precise, so talked about as exceeding the two. They fear most that she would marry best. But Skalliger comes in to inform them of Leir’s intentions to marry Ragan to ...
Leir discusses with noble advisors his intent to divide his kingdom among his daughters, lamenting the loss of his wife, that he really cannot parent them, and his failure to bear a son before his loins were withered. He sees Gonorill and Ragan capitalizing on ...
The following scene directory may be used to link to any scene in the play. Scene 1. Leir decides to divide his kingdom, apply a test of love. Scene 2. Gonorill and Ragan, advised of the King’s play, plot against Cordella. Scene 3. They meet, ...
DRAMATIS PERSONAE Leir, King of Britain. Gonorill, daughter of King Leir, later wife of the King of Cornwall. Ragan, daughter of King Leir, later wife of the King of Cambria. Cordella, daughter of King Leir, later wife of the King of Gallia. Cornwall, King of ...
Lamenting the loss of his wife and lack of male issue, Leir decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters so they might attract the most powerful husbands. He proposes a love test to secure his own beliefs. The elder two daughters, smarting over ...
BACKGROUND In Shakespeare’s day there was neither television nor radio, neither dictionaries nor history books as we know them, not even newspapers or magazines. Formal schooling took place in Latin and covered classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome. University schooling generally prepared students for ...
Sir Philip Sidney Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was a courtier, soldier, and poet, who, with the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Wyatt, were the English examples of the Renaissance man. Also like Raleigh and Wyatt, he ran afoul of the reigning monarch, and ...
Edmund Spenser Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599) can be rightfully considered England’s finest poet of the sixteenth century. (Shakespeare and Donne, his rivals for such a credit, lived and wrote into the seventeenth century and in a sense belong more properly to the later age, although ...
Raphael Holinshed (died c. 1580) is one of the mysterious souls from the English Renaissance who left a lasting mark but almost no other trace of himself. He published in 1577 the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a massive compilation of history and myth ...
