Goneril and Regan are ruthlessly in control. They have gained ground dramatically in Act 2 and have seized the initiative.  Lear has been forced to confront the truth about his daughters and to face the folly of his decision.

Go on thinking about what makes this extract dramatically exciting.  Here are a few ideas for you to think about:

1. It deals with the archetypal situation of power passing from the old to the young.

2. It taps into male anxiety about powerful women (see Kathleen Mcluskie’s essay on “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and King Lear” 1985 in the New Macmillan Casebook.

3. It has an extraordinary momentum as Goneril and Regan with practised efficiency, make every word count and force Lear to face the logic of their position.

4. It has great pathos as we watch a proud man being made a fool of and we cannot help but squirm for him.

5. It has an element of grotesque comedy.

6. It plays on the notion of the roles people play. In Shakespeare’s time all the parts were played by men so that questions such as what is appropriate behaviour for a man and a woman, a father and a daughter, a king and a subject become emblematic. (See King Lear by Terence Hawkes 1995 for an excellent exploration of this.) By reducing Lear’s followers, Goneril and Regan show their father that he no longer has a role to play: while they adopt new roles as imperious leaders in their own right.

7. It dramatises the predicament of a King who finds his authority reduced rather than endorsed in a way that contemporary audiences would have found very daring, even risky.

8. It dramatises the gap between what appears to be true and what the characters’ real intentions are. Goneril and Regan present themselves as governed by reason but they use reason to coerce and bully. What seems like daughterly good advice is thinly disguised exasperation and defiance.

9. It dramatises loss. Lear had taken it for granted that he was loved and respected by Goneril and Regan but he is made to realise that it is self interest they love, not him. He thought what he most needed to preserve his sense of himself was his retime of knights but these have been stripped away from him.

10. It breaks taboos. Children should respect their parents, subjects should honour their sovereign, guests should be treated with hospitality and obey codes of decorum themselves; (they are all guests in Gloucester’s castle).

11. It dramatises the failure of a father’s power to command love and the emotional price he pays for attempting to wield such power; (see Coppelia Kahn’s essay in the New Casebook).