1. The role of violence in Act 3,
scene 7

2. Violence in Greek tragedy
• Many ancient Greek tragedians employed
the ekkyklêma as a theatrical device, which was
a platform hidden behind the scene that could be
rolled out to display the aftermath of some event
which had happened out of sight of the
audience.
• This event was frequently a brutal murder of
some sort, an act of violence which could not be
effectively portrayed visually, but an action of
which the other characters must see the effects
in order for it to have meaning and emotional
resonance.
• Variations on the ekkyklêma are used in
tragedies and other forms to this day, as writers
still find it a useful and often powerful device for
showing the consequences of extreme human
actions.

3. Portrayal of violence
• There were constraints to portraying violence:
– the audience must never witness any act or occurrence that impinged
on a human or animal body so as to be the proximate cause of a death
– the audience must not witness any person inflicting a blow on any
other person.
• The first convention was based on religious considerations, and was
unbreakable; the second was based on artistic considerations
• However, violence could be presented verbally, through
‘messenger‐speeches’ or other forms of narrative, with virtually no
limits on the intensity of the horrors described; nor were the
dramatists in the least squeamish about presenting on stage
the results of violence in the most appalling form—the blinded
Oedipus or Polymestor, the dismembered corpse of Pentheus, Aias
amidst the animals he has tortured and slaughtered or the agonies
that Prometheus is suffering.

4. Think!
What is genuinely disturbing/acceptable in a
live theatrical performance?

5. Key question –AO2
How is the violence of
this scene is
conveyed through
language (imagery,
figurative language,
line length, caesura,
punctuation)?

6. Key question - AO3
Why might Shakespeare have
wanted his audience to
endure the blinding of
Gloucester?

7. Critical starting point...
Wilson Knight in the chapter called "King Lear and the Comedy of the
Grotesque'' in his book The Wheel of Fire (1930) writes:
The gouging out of Gloucester's eyes is a thing unnecessary, crude,
disgusting; it is meant to be. It helps to provide an accompanying
exaggeration of one element --- that of cruelty --- in the horror that
makes Lear's madness. And not only horror: there is even again
something satanically comic bedded deep within it. The sight of
physical torment, to the uneducated, brings laughter. Shakespeare's
England delighted in watching both physical torment and the comic
ravings of actual lunacy. These ghoulish horrors, so popular in
Elizabethan drama and the very stuff of the Lear of Shakespeare's
youth, Titus Andronicus, find an exquisitely appropriate place in the
tragedy of Shakespeare's maturity which takes as its especial
province the territory of the grotesque and the fantastic which is
Lear's madness.

8. Summing up
• Eyes/ vision are key motifs in
the play.
– Where else do they occur?
– What is the symbolic
significance?