Lit 12

We reviewed the fact / react charts which were based on the margin notes, page 22. Remember that you will be handing in your notes at the end of the unit. Simply copying today's notes off the board will not get you top marks. I look at your notes to assess your level of engagement with the play. You can use your notes as a "thinking" ground, a great resource when you start to put ideas together for your literary essay. Be sure that you understand Edmund's dedication to "Nature" with a capital N. This dedication is very different notion from what we commonly associate with nature.

I collected the paragraphs on Edmund's Act 1, Sc. 2 soliloquy. If you were absent today, please bring a note in order to be able to submit the paragraphs late.

All paragraphs for those students present today are due by the end of the day.

I handed out a study guide for your reading of Act 1, scenes 2, 3, and 4. As you read underline key images, metaphors, symbols and repeated lines. Notice shifts in tone. Notice shifts in diction as diction is a clear indicator of a speaker's mood.

Create point form notes to the questions on the sheet. Marita, Geoffrey, Erin and Elliot, I will email you the sheet. I created it at home so you will get it at the end of today.

Homework: Complete the readings, the underlining and the notes for Monday on Act 1, Scenes 2, 3, and 4.

You may want to get a good start on your FOOL project as well, which is due Jan. 31. Fool notes below:

The Fool – King Lear
The Royal Shakespeare Company writes of the Fool:

There is no contemporary parallel for the role of Fool in the court of kings. As Shakespeare conceives it, the Fool is a servant and subject to punishment ('Take heed, sirrah – the whip ' 1:4:104) and yet Lear's relationship with his fool is one of friendship and dependency. The Fool acts as a commentator on events and is one of the characters (Kent being the other) who is fearless in speaking the truth. The Fool provides wit in this bleak play and unlike some of Shakespeare's clowns who seem unfunny to us today because their topical jokes no longer make sense, the Fool in King Lear ridicules Lear's actions and situation in such a way that audiences understand the point of his jokes. His 'mental eye' is the most acute in the beginning of the play: he sees Lear's daughters for what they are and has the foresight to see that Lear's decision will prove disastrous.^[4]

Writes Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary,

The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good. Lear, insisting on his fictitious majesty, seems ridiculous to him. All the more ridiculous because he does not see how ridiculous he is. But the Fool does not desert his ridiculous, degraded king, and accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.