Some Paper Suggestions:

As you plan the analytic part of your paper on King Lear, I suggest you examine the helpful material on writing critical papers (including the model critical papers) linked to the web page. In addition, here are some very large questions that have been posed about the play; they may give you some directions for your own thinking:

For both Lear and Gloucester, the play seems to trace a pattern based first on mistakes that they both made, then on the intense suffering they both undergo, and finally on what each learns or realizes from the experience. What mistake does each make and why, what kind of suffering does each endure, and, most of all, what and how much does each learn from the experience?

Women readers are particularly troubled by this play, because they feel that women--Goneril, Regan, and even Cordelia--are presented in such a negative light. In the masculine, patriarchal world of this play, do men, particularly King Lear, attempt to control, even repress women? And does the fact that all three women in the play are dehumanized--Goneril and Regan are presented as cruel and self-aggrandizing, while Cordelia is idealized into a veritable angel--suggest how anxious Elizabethan men, perhaps even Shakespeare, were about women stepping out of their assigned subordinate roles?

Many readers see this play as a critique of authoritarian, patriarchal, and absolutist theories of power and rule. Do the tragic consequences in this play come about because Elizabethan culture appears to privilege power (especially male power), property, and inheritance over community, relationships, even love?