Raising Cordelia: Hope and Despair of Resurrection in King Lear
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date published 26/09/2007
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SummaryOf Shakespeare’s many plays, King Lear is certainly one of the most troubling and provoking. In comparison to the comedies and romances, it has a much darker setting and content; but even compared with other tragedies, it seems King Lear is confounded by its lack of a conclusive moral framework. This is demonstrated by its ambiguous ending and leads to an eternal question: does the play promote optimism or pessimism? The answer is tied to the issue of context, in that the play’s setting is pre-Christian. However, in other plays, Shakespeare manipulates the conventions of form to allow optimism in a pagan world, and thus the answer to the largest question of the play turns out not to be derivable from the text alone. Thus, the choice to portray it one way or the other falls into the hands of a production’s director.
Table of Contents
- The on-stage action which most directly raises the question of pessimism or optimism is King Lear himself, in the last few moments of his life, taking in the sight of his dead daughter Cordelia.
- The reason that Cordelia's death so strongly affects a play in which several others die is that the audience does not really expect it.
- This is borne out in Act IV, scene 7, when Lear and Cordelia are reunited. At this meeting, two things happen
- At this point, the rug has finally been pulled from under the audience
- The remaining question, then, is how to signal this to the audience
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