Tragedy

A.C. Bradley: "Such exceptional suffering and calamity, then, affecting the hero, and -- we must now add -- generally extending far and wide beyond him, so as to make the whole scene a scene of woe, are an essential ingredient in tragedy, and a chief source of the tragic emotions, and especially of pity."

Carol Rutter argues that the play is “primarily about patriarchal anxieties and effeminisation”

Lear's speech begins concise but becomes lengthier throughout the play

“let not women’s weapons, water drops, stain my man’s cheeks” - an actor is often seen crying during this part of the play, which is powerful in visually conveying a great deal of emotion

sycophantic means attempting to gain favour by using flattery

David Scott Kastan, ‘“A rarity most beloved”: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy’, 2003

Kastan sees Shakespeare’s tragedies as intense treatments of age-old questions about whether the causes of suffering lie in human weakness, divine retribution, or arbitrary fate.

"in its reticence about who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune it speaks tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility."

"These are the unanswered (perhaps unanswerable) questions of the tragic world. Are there reasons for the intolerable suffering? Is the tragic motor human error or capricious fate? Is the catastrophe a just, if appalling, retribution, or an arbitrary destiny reflecting the indifference, or, worse, the malignity of the heavens?"

"characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old."

"Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonizingly portray, and in the refusal of any answers starkly prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering."

"Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering, and as he writes in that mode the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgment of their desolating controlling logic."