'Nothing, my lord.' Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Nothing!" "Nothing". "Nothing will come from nothing..." King Lear (I.1.78-81)Shakespeare saturates King Learning with metaphors that, in their "literalization", aid a single overarching metaphor that guides the course of the tragedy in the play: nothingness . The entire play is an apocalyptic metaphor for the end of the world, symbolized by the storm and Shakespeare's direct references to Armageddon in the Book of Revelation. The King himself metaphorically represents the reduction of completeness to nothingness, and every other character aids this through the literalization of various metaphors centered on themes of madness, foolishness, blindness, and nakedness. The word nulla 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 keynote that defines the idea of ​​loss. Harold Bloom, in "Shakespeare: The Invention of Man" describes King Lear as "the most tragic of all tragedies" in which everything ends in despair and despite "spasmodic flashes" of insight there is no sense of " redemption" as AC Bradley suggests. In Lear nothing is gained, nothing is lost and sent to nothingness. Loss of love, loss of wisdom, loss of sanity, loss of sight, loss of life, loss of power and loss of faith, all support Bloom's conclusion that "The work is a storm without subsequent resolution", is an irreversible fall. into nothingness. This lack of moral cleanliness and the flood of tragedies everywhere have led to strong critical resentment over the last four hundred years. Frank Kermode described King Lear as "unrepresentable" and "too submerged" by death, and Peter Sabor described the tragedy as "complex and contradictory". Elizabethan audiences were so shocked by the play's infinite misery that in 1681 Nahum Tate completely revised it. Shakespeare's text for the taste of the late Restoration; he cut out the fools and rewrote a happy ending in which Gloucester, Lear and Cordelia survive. The final speech in The History of King Lear Revived with Alterations glorifies the success of "truth and virtue" and Lear celebrates the return to peace; “Our falling country now raises its head” (V.3.153-4). Tate's adaptation only amplifies the insistence of complete tragedy and nothingness in the original text when Albany states "Our present task is that of the general trouble" (V.3.318), and the three survivors are left with only the task of "supporting" the "gored state" (V.3.319). Even compared to Shakespeare's other tragic works, King Lear is downright morbid. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet ensure a lasting peace between warring families, Macbeth's tyranny is ended 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). However, as Trevor Nunn states, "there is no sense of divine justice" in King Lear, and any hint of restoration is simply what Enid Welsford describes as "spasmodic flashes" of insight. The ultimate purpose of the literalization of metaphor is to confuse everything with nothing; 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 flattened by the complete lack of influence he has on the main plot and on Lear himself; they never say a word to each other. Harold Bloom unknowingly supports the idea of ​​the literalization of metaphor causing nothingness in his comparison between Lear and the figure of Solomonof the Book of Kings. They embody "the elderly monarch" who is "wise but embittered" and ultimately has nothing left due to the literalization of the division of their kingdoms. Crucially, both Kings have a distinct "grounding in greatness" and are presented, in the beginning, as "paradigm(s) of greatness". Both are loved dearly by all the benign characters in their lives, Lear so much that even those he chased away return to help him. Although Goneril and Regan dismissed their father as a man who "always knew himself only poorly." , the king must have been wise and self-aware before the work began to earn such love from his subjects. This provides, importantly, the highest of all podiums for Lear to fall from; the literalization of his divided Kingdom and descent into madness are made infinitely more tragic by the knowledge of the king's former greatness. Solomon's wisdom is perversely echoed at various times by Lear as a reminder of this earlier eminence. Nothing is more tangible than the completion of Solomon's statement "We are born weeping and weeping at first as all others do" (Wisdom of Solomon 7:1-6), when, in a frenzy of madness on the moor Lear says "When we are born, we cry that we have come / To this great stage of fools” (IV.6.174). Edgar, aside, notes Lear's "matter and impertinence mingled, / Reason in madness" (IV.6.170). However, these flashes are only the faded remnants of his old self, for only a few lines later he responds senselessly to the Gentleman "To use his eyes for garden vessels of water." (IV.6.192)Lear dies with equal eccentricity, deluding himself that Cordelia has come back to life; still loved and mourned by the remaining characters, Bloom sees this love as "pragmatically a waste of time", since the King "knows not what he says" (V.3.291) and cannot recognize the love shown to him and the truth which is explained. The same can be said of Gloucester when Edgar observes "He has had children as I have begotten" (III.6.107); both old men are killed by their fatherly love, which may be stronger than death but only leads to death, or death in life for Edgar. As Samuel Johnson famously states, “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 condemned to adversity and nothingness. Eric Rasmussen and Jonathan Bate's allusion to Gloucester's blinding, the "cruelest" yet most blatant "literalization of metaphor," is prevalent exclusively in the exploration of eternal marital love. nothing as far as sight and intuition are concerned. Gloucester has nothing in the way of intuition, so his eyes are open and he has nothing in the way of literal vision that allows him to gain insight into learning the truth about his bastard son Edmund. «I have no way, and therefore I have no need of eyes; / I stumbled when I saw' (IV.1.18-19). This, however, is another momentary flash of insight as Gloucester can no longer have any effect on the discourse of the play, and he returns to nothingness with his death in Act V. His physical blindness is the literalization, and perhaps the punishment , for metaphorical blindness. which controls both Gloucester and Lear. The two are starkly comparable in this sense, both choosing their unfaithful children as heirs over loyal ones and only realizing this because they were punished by blindness or madness. Shakespeare makes constant reference to "sight", "seeing" and "eyes"as metaphors for understanding wisdom. The opening scene in which Lear dismisses Kent "Out of my sight!" and Kent replies “See better, Lear” (I.1.157-8) is a metaphor that comes true and results in the loss of insight for Lear. Kent being out of Lear's sight pushes his ideas out of his mind and can no longer have any effect on Lear when he returns as Caius. The Fool, despite only appearing in six of the twenty scenes, certainly has the greatest influence on Lear in terms of his literalizing madness and madness. There is great ambiguity as to what the Fool actually is, having been interpreted in production in various ways. Lear refers to the Fool as "boy", "boy", and "handsome knave", and the Fool regularly endears Lear as "uncle", suggesting a large age gap. However the Fool has been portrayed as an old, physically disabled and demented man and is even described as a "sprite" or "changeling" by Frank Kermode. Michael Billington describes the Fool as Lear's alter ego, the "visible sign of his madness", but perhaps the Fool could be an invisible sign of madness, a projection developed through the madness to accommodate the King's mad but sporadically insightful ramblings If this is the case, then the Fool's role is even more symbolic in representing Lear's descent into madness. Lear despises the idea of ​​being mad. "Oh!" May I not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; /Keep me calm; I wouldn't 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 identity'; his language becomes even more similar to the Fool's riddles and rhymes. Wyndham Lewis notes Lear's "bloated blank verse" as his disgust drives him to the point of incoherence. He abandons iambic pentameter and spits out the words “Fie, fie, fie!” pah! pah!' (IV.6.126) Nakedness provides another metaphor that becomes literal to describe Lear's madness and fall into nothingness. In the two initial acts reference is made to "clothes", in particular to "buttons", the removal of which in the subsequent 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 in nakedness after realizing that he has cared "too little care" (III.4.33) about poverty, inequality, and injustice for the "poor naked wretches" of his kingdom whose "raggedness" cannot protect them by the storm (III .4.33-34). Edgar describes his pen name as a man who once "had six shirts on his back, three suits on his body" (III.4.135-6), but now has nothing left, "no silk...no skin...nothing wool...without perfume' and is 'not accommodating man' (III.4.105-8 He is the exact mirror image of Lear and the literalisation of his sheer madness and loss of power through the metaphor of shedding his clothes shows Lear). as "the unaccommodated man." Lear certainly learns some humility in experiencing the poverty of nakedness and when he is given a rebirth of clothing in "fresh garments" (IV.7.128) by Cordelia, he is offered salvation ; Lear goes beyond this; he can no longer understand the world around him and as he dies he tells Edgar "Please undo this button" (V.3.308) to remove his metaphorical life support which is clothing and return to nothing. Throughout King Lear, Shakespeare makes very overt use of many biblical passages referring to the end of the world, but chooses to set the tragedy in an explicitly pre-Christian Britain. In this way he mocks the idea of ​​creation “ex nihilo” of Genesis and reverses the sacred confession into a fall into nothingness. He is consciously parodying Elizabethan turbulence"., 1966.]]]]]