“King Lear”:
The fall of Gloucester depict a political fall (impotence).
Edgar betrayed his father by making him believe that he has jumped off the cliff.
Space has a symbolical dimension. He also makes him believe that he is another person and that he survives from the fall thanks to gods. The catharses aimed at the audience. In order to cure is father from his suicidal tendencies, Edgar used imaginary place to cure him. Rhetorical skills, it can be seen on the stage because it’s a bare stage and it was invented by Edgar to fool him. He plays with the fact his father is blind. The main passage is on paradoxes. The madman leads the blind man. Dramatic irony= when you know more than the character -> different from tragic irony= when a character do an action without knowing that it’ll have a tragic consequences. (didascalies= stage direction) embedding spaces. The audience is led to believe that there are fields on the stage. It release on the virtuality of spaces, illusions that theatrical place feed off. Space is not static it’s very dynamic it’s following the falling of someone from the edge of a cliff -> vertical traject. Describe in a metonymic way => metonymy= a figure of speech which use a part to describe the whole or the whole to designate the part. It appeals to motion it’s a downward movement, a change of perspective. It anticipates on the movement of the fall and it’s also strategic as Edgar considers it. He states the existence and the impossibility of place at once. He particularly insists on sense of sight and earring. It’s only to empathize their weakening power (deficiency) space is multi-referential. A dialogue of the deaf= when people speak at cross purposes. Use of rhetorical devices. Unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Aliteration -> repetition d’un son en début d’un mot. Assonance -> repetition d’un son vocalique. Don’t need the backcloth because space is recreated in and through language. (hypotyposis= lively description to create the illusion of reality) space allows Gloucester to fall and rise again, to go through, to experience strong emotions, feel pity and terror, purgation of these emotions=> purge, impotence. It is a limit place. A topographical figure of spaces. Limit between natural and supernatural.