EA 190 Shakespeare & Japan Discussion Questions Week 7: King Lear continued and Ran

King Lear (continued):

Forum Discussion for this week):

1. Does Lear learn anything from his suffering? Why or why not? You wrote on this last week for one of your discussion questions, and people gave lots of interesting answers. So I'd like to give you an opportunity to share your insights with the rest of the class. Provide lines/page numbers to support your position!

Please post at least once, and reply at least once.

2. A dramatic convention that was common in Shakespeare's time was the convention of exposition: that as quickly and smoothly as possible in the first act the playwright is supposed to give us our bearings, to let us know who's who and what's what, who we're supposed to root for, and who we're supposed to be booing. Does Shakespeare follow this convention, particularly in the first scene? (divided into three parts: 1. conversation between Gloucester, Kent and Edmund; 2. Lear attempts to divided his kingdom between his daughters and ends up banishing Cordelia; 3. Goneril and Regan talk about their father).If you had only read this one scene, what would you think of the various characters? Would you necessarily have thought that Edmund, Goneril, and Regan were going to turn out to be horribly evil children? That Cordelia was a paragon of virtue? Why might Shakespeare have done this?

3. I'd like you to think about imagery in King Lear. Pick ONE of the following kinds of imagery in the play and note all the instances you can find (lines and page numbers). Pick two of the images you've found (not just the first two you run into please!), quote the lines in which the image appears, and discuss what you think that image means in the specific context and in the wider context of the play.

a. Weather: how does it appear to reflect the external social chaos and the internal mental turmoil of Lear?

b. Vision and blindness, both literal and metaphorical: i.e. the difference between literal blindness (eg. after Gloucester gets his eyes plucked out) and the blindness of not understanding (eg. Gloucester not recognizing which son actually loves him).

c. Clothing and nakedness: how do clothes "make the man" in King Lear? How are clothes related to power? Why does Lear take off his clothing when he goes mad?

d. Nothing and nothingness: When Cordelia replies "nothing" to her father's request to tell him how much she loves him, he says "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again." From this moment onward, the idea of nothing, nothingness, naught, zero (a mathematical concept which had only just been introduced) appears repeatedly. What is the effect of all this nothinginess?

e. Animal imagery: used to describe Goneril and Regan, especially.

Some Preliminary Questions to think about as you are watching Ran (some of these will be discussion questions for next week)

1. Ran is less of a direct adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear than Throne of Blood was of Macbeth. So much of the plot is changed that it doesn't make sense to try to figure out exactly what Kurosawa eliminated or added to the story. But as a starting point, try to figure out who the characters in Ran are parallel to in King Lear (note that some of the characters are doubled).

2. As in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa provides more motivation (psychological and political) for the events that happen. Disaster and cruelty no longer have the mysterious, cosmic arbitrariness postulated by King Lear but are shown as the direct result of human error or wrong-doing. How does this change your view of the main characters, particulary Hidetora and Kaede?

3. After Lear’s abdication, when he first stays with Goneril, we hear that he has been hunting. In Kozintsev's famous film of King Lear, he shows us this hunt to convey the size and rowdiness of Lear’s retinue, which gives some justification to Goneril’s complaints. Later in the play we find connected images of predation and animal nature (particularly with regard to unfilial behavior by daughters and sons). How does Ran visually dramatize these themes? Why does Kurosawa locate the hunt at the very beginning of the film, before Hidetora's abdication? In Hidetora's speech after the hunt justifying his abdication he uses the image of the boar and arrows from the hunt. Are there ways in which Hidetora's intentions are subverted by these images? How do they forshadow later events?

4. Throne of Blood was in black and white, and Kurosawa said he based his use of color on black and white ink drawings (sumi-e); Ran is in hyper-color, and Kurosawa said he based his use of color on images from medieval scrolls depicting famous battles, such as The Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace. How does Kurosawa use color to identify the characters and visually organize the battle scenes? How does this use of color make the action more symbolic/allegorical and less realistic? Does this have an effect on how you view what happens, especially the battle scenes?