'Nothing, my lord.'Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay “Nothing! " " Nothing ". "Nothing will come of nothing..." King Lear (I.1.78-81) Shakespeare saturates King Lear with metaphors which, in their "literalization", support a single, overarching metaphor which guides the course of the tragedy in the play: nothingness. The entire play is an apocalyptic metaphor for the end of the world, embodied by the storm and Shakespeare's direct references to Armageddon in the Book of Revelation. The king himself metaphorically represents the reduction of wholeness to nothingness, and all the other characters contribute to this by literalizing various metaphors focusing on the themes of madness, stupidity, blindness, and nudity. The word nothing appears no less than 34 times in the play, five times in the space of ten words in Act I, scene 1; it is the key note that defines the idea of ​​loss. Harold Bloom, in “Shakespeare: The Invention of Man,” describes King Lear as “the most tragic of all tragedies” where everything ends in despair and where despite “spasmodic flashes” of insight, he does not There is no sense of “redemption” as AC Bradley suggests. . Nothing is gained in Lear, only lost and sent to nothingness. The loss of love, the loss of wisdom, the loss of reason, the loss of sight, the loss of life, the loss of power and the loss of faith, all support Bloom's conclusion that which "the piece is a storm without further clarification", it is an irreversible fall. into nothingness. This lack of moral cleansing and inundation of tragedy has led to much critical resentment over the past four hundred years. Frank Kermode described King Lear as "unplayable" and "too overwhelmed" by death, and Peter Sabor described the tragedy as "complex and contradictory." Elizabethan audiences were so appalled by the play's endless misery that in 1681 Nahum Tate completely revised it. Shakespeare's text for the taste of the end of the Restoration; he cut out the crazy and rewrote a happy ending where Gloucester, Lear and Cordelia all survive. The final speech of The History of King Lear Resurrected with Modifications glorifies the success of "truth and virtue," and Lear celebrates the return to peace; “Our decayed land now raises its head” (V.3.153-4). Tate's adaptation only amplifies the emphasis on total tragedy and nothingness in the original text when Albany declares: "Our present affair is general misfortune" (V.3.318), and the three survivors do not have more than to “support” “the gored state” (V.3.318). V.3.319).Even compared to Shakespeare's other tragic works, King Lear is totally morbid. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet bring lasting peace between the warring families, Macbeth's tyranny ends and a new social order is established, and in the final scene of Hamlet the prince dies but is carried to heaven by " flights of angels” (V.2.371). There is, however, as Trevor Nunn states, "no sense of divine justice" in King Lear, and any hints of a restoration are only what Enid Welsford describes as "spasmodic flashes" of insight . The ultimate goal of literalizing the metaphor is to confuse everything into nothingness; as Kent concludes; “Everything is sad, dark and deadly. » (V.3.288) While Othello is Iago's play and Julius Caesar is Brutus, King Lear is certainly Lear's play. Any argument for Edmund's superiority is destroyed by the complete lack of influence he has on the main plot and on Lear himself; they never say a single word to each other. Harold Bloom unknowingly defends the idea of ​​aliteralization of the metaphor causing nothingness in his comparison between Lear and the figure of Solomon from the Book of Kings. They embody “the old monarch” who is “wise but exaggerated” and who ultimately find themselves with nothing because of the literalization of the division of their kingdoms. Basically, the two kings have a distinct "first plane of greatness" and are presented, in the beginning, as "paradigm(s) of greatness". They are both deeply loved by all the caring characters in their lives, Lear so much so that even those he rejects come back to help him. Despite Goneril and Regan's rejection of their father as a man who "always knew very little about himself". , the king had to be wise and self-aware before the play began to deserve such love from his subjects. This gives Lear the highest of all podiums to fall from; the literalization of his divided kingdom and his descent into madness are made infinitely more tragic by the knowledge of the king's former greatness. The wisdom of Solomon is perversely taken up at various points by Lear as a reminder of this earlier eminence. None is more tangible than its completeness of Solomon's assertion: "We were born weeping and weeping at first, like all others" (Wisdom of Solomon 7:1-6), when, in a frenzy of madness on the heath, Lear says: “When we are born, we cry that we have arrived / To that great stage of fools” (IV.6.174). The sardonic mockery of Solomon's words is one of Lear's most astute "spasmodic flashes" of insight, delicately hidden between bursts of nonsense. Edgar, in an aside, notes Lear's "mixture of matter and impertinence, / Reason in Madness" (IV.6.170). However, these flashes are only fading vestiges of his former self, as a few lines later he absurdly replies to the gentleman "To use his eyes as garden water pots." (IV.6.192) Lear dies with the same eccentricity, deceiving himself that Cordelia has come back to life; “Look at her: look at her lips” (V.3.308). Although he is still loved and mourned by the other characters, Bloom considers this love "pragmatically a waste of time", because the king "knows not what he says" (V.3.291) and cannot recognize the love that is shown to him and the truth that is explained. The same can be said of Gloucester when Edgar remarks: “As I have begotten he hath brought forth” (III.6.107); the two old men are killed by their paternal love, which is perhaps stronger than death but only leads to death, or to death in life for Edgar. As Samuel Johnson said so well: “Love is the wisdom of fools and the folly of wise men”; it is not a healer and only leads to tragedy. King Lear lacks the romance of eternal marital love and is therefore ultimately doomed to adversity and nothingness.0 Eric Rasmussen and Jonathan Bate's allusion to Gloucester's blindness, the "literalization of the metaphor » the most “cruel” and open, prevails only in the exploration of nothingness with regard to sight and insight. Gloucester has nothing in terms of insight, then has his eyes gouged out and has nothing in literal vision which allows him to understand better as he learns the truth about his bastard son Edmund. “I have no means and therefore I do not want eyes; / I stumbled when I saw” (IV.1.18-19). This is, however, another momentary flash of insight, as Gloucester can no longer have any effect on the discourse of the play and returns to nothingness in his death in Act V. His physical blindness is literalization, and can -to be the punishment, of metaphorical blindness. who controls both Gloucester and Lear. The two are clearly comparable in this sense, both choosing their childrendisloyal as heirs rather than their followers and only realizing it because they have been punished by blindness or madness. Shakespeare constantly refers to “sight,” “sight,” and “eyes” as metaphors for understanding wisdom. The opening scene when Lear sends Kent away “Get out of my sight!” and Kent responds “See better, Lear” (I.1.157-8) is a self-fulfilling metaphor that results in a loss of insight for Lear. With Kent out of Lear's sight, he forgets his ideas: he can no longer have any effect on Lear when he returns as Caius. The Fool, although he only appears in six of the twenty scenes, certainly has the greatest influence on Lear in terms of his literal madness and foolishness. There is considerable ambiguity as to what the Fool actually is, having been interpreted in production in several ways. Lear refers to the Fool as "Boy", "boy", and "pretty knave", and the Fool regularly refers to Lear as "Nuncle", suggesting a large age gap. However, the Fool was played as an old man, a physically disabled and demented man and was even described as a "goblin" or "changeling" by Frank Kermode. Michael Billington describes the Madman as Lear's alter ego, the "visible mark of his madness", but perhaps the Fool could be an invisible mark of madness, a projection developed by madness to shelter the mad but sporadically ramblings insightful thoughts of the king. If this is the case, the role of the Fool is even more symbolic in representing Lear's descent into madness. Lear despises the idea of ​​being mad 'O! Don't let me go crazy, not crazy, my God; / Keep me in a good mood; I would not be mad” (I.5.159), but as he tries to cling to his sanity, his language slips into what Katherine Hodgkin describes as “disordered speech” born of “the instability of identify " ; his language resembles even more the riddles and rhymes of the Fool. Wyndham Lewis notes Lear's "bloated blank verse" as his disgust carries him to the point of incoherence. He abandons iambic pentameter and spits out the words “Fi, fi, fi!” pah! pah! » (IV.6.126) Nudity provides another metaphor that becomes literal to describe Lear's madness and his fall into nothingness. “Clothes”, particularly “buttons”, are mentioned throughout the first two acts, the removal of which in later acts symbolizes the reduction to nothingness. Poor Tom, Edgar's disguise, embodies the "naked boy" (III.4.37) who is complete nothingness. Lear joins him naked after realizing that he has "concerned too little" (III.4.33) about poverty, inequality and injustice for the "poor naked wretches" of his kingdom whose "rags » cannot protect them from the storm (III. .4.33-34). Edgar describes his pseudonym as a man who once "had six shirts on his back, three suits on his body" (III.4.135-6), but who now finds himself with nothing, "no silk... no skin... no" . wool...no perfume' and is 'the man without accommodation' (III.4.105-8). He is the exact mirror image of Lear and the literalization of his naked madness and loss of power through the metaphor of undressing presents Lear as "the man without accommodation." Lear certainly learns some humility by experiencing the poverty of nakedness and when he receives a rebirth of clothing with “fresh garments” (IV.7.128) from Cordelia, salvation is offered to him. However; Lear is beyond that; he can no longer understand the world around him and as he dies, he says to Edgar "Please undo this button" (V.3.308) to remove his metaphorical life support of clothing and return to nothingness . Throughout King Lear, Shakespeare very openly uses numerous biblical passages linked to the end of the world, while choosing to situate the, 1966.]]]]]