In this unit we focused on the story of King Lear, one of Shakespeare 's many plays. King Lear is based on a real story that was written in the year 1135 from a book called History of the King of Britain. King Lear was based on a Celtic legend. The name Lear in Celtic means the Celtic God of the sea. He is similar to the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon. They both have the same characteristics such as moody and tempestuous. In this play, Shakespeare uses different types of imagery. According to Aristotle tragedy, “ is an imitation of an action that is serious,complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament” (Aristotle section VI). Shakespeare could’ve just written straight to the point but he wanted the audience and the reader to have a more descriptive image of what was happening and connect with them emotionally. In this paper we were asked to focus on one of the specific topics and the topic I want to focus on the most is dark and light imagery.
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This scene is where Lear was hosting a ceremony for the marriage of his youngest daughter Cordelia, but there was another reason why the ceremony was hosted and Lear expressed it as, “Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose” (Durband). This line is foreshadowing the dark events that are going to happen in the play. Not only does it foreshadow the darkness that Lear is going to be in because of this purpose, what he means here is he has a secret that nobody knows about and the secret was he is going to be passing down his kingdom to his daughters,but only if they say how much they love him and can take care of him every other month. Cordelia did not accept these conditions because she saw it was wrong to do while her sisters did. When this happened this was the start of how the dark imagery in the play
This scene is where Lear was hosting a ceremony for the marriage of his youngest daughter Cordelia, but there was another reason why the ceremony was hosted and Lear expressed it as, “Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose” (Durband). This line is foreshadowing the dark events that are going to happen in the play. Not only does it foreshadow the darkness that Lear is going to be in because of this purpose, what he means here is he has a secret that nobody knows about and the secret was he is going to be passing down his kingdom to his daughters,but only if they say how much they love him and can take care of him every other month. Cordelia did not accept these conditions because she saw it was wrong to do while her sisters did. When this happened this was the start of how the dark imagery in the play