Second Essay Assignment
Instructions
The final paper is to be an essay of 8-12 pages (approximately 2,000 to 2,500 words), and is due on Friday, June 12. Please include a word count with your paper.) Please submit your paper (via the Blackboard portal) as a PDF file, with your last name at the start of the filename. Please also remember to include your name on the first page of the paper itself, and to number the pages.
If you need additional time to complete the paper, you may make arrangements to receive a grade of temporary course grade of Incomplete. I am very amenable to such arrangements, but please be aware that the filing date for course grades is June 13, and I am not allowed to file a grade of temporary Incomplete for a student unless I receive a request from the student, with an agreed-upon resolution date. Please also be aware that if submit your paper subsequent to receiving a temporary grade of Incomplete, it may take some time before the new grade appears on your transcript— I am unfortunately unable to give any assurances about how much time it may take, as it depends on factors beyond my control.
The expectations for the essay are the same as those for the previous essay, as set forth in detail in that assignment. Please carefully review both the “Instructions” and “General Guidance” posted with that assignment, as well as the “Guidelines for Essays” posted separately under Course Documents on Blackboard. Please also give careful attention to the comments given for your first essay, as these have been given specifically for the purpose of clarifying the expectations for this next essay.
Topics
Write an essay on the sense and significance of either of the following statements from King Lear, considered both in their immediate context, and the drama as a whole.
1.) Edgar: …Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all. (V.2.9-11)
2.) Lear: Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. (V.3.20-21)
Note: Do NOT assume that these statements are to be taken encapsulate the meaning of the drama, or the speaker’s general outlook. They have been selected for your consideration simply because they present the sort of challenge to understanding that would merit closer examination in an essay. Keep in mind that the drama consists in the actions and utterances of individual characters, in response to the situations in which they find themselves. It is always relevant to connect what a speaker says in relation to what that speaker has said previously, or said by others in that person’s presence, but always taking the circumstances of the utterance into account. (Utterances made by others even when the character is absent might also be relevant, but then the nature of the relevance has to be carefully qualified.)
Additonal notes:
You may write on either of the two topics provided below in section 2 of this assignment. The two prompts give you considerable flexibility in approaching the topics, but please be sure to to meet the general expectations for the assignment. Your essay should be organized around a focused and pointed thesis, supported by an argument well-grounded in the details of the text. A pointed thesis is one that responds to an interpretative question that is open to plausible doubt or dispute, and which has the potential to enlarge and enrich our understanding of the work under discussion. It is up to you to formulate the question to which your essay responds, and to decide which issues are most important to discuss in detail. (See Section 3, below, for further general guidance.)
Be sure to support your argument with copious textual evidence, referring to specific lines in the text (cited according to the N.C.S. edition). This does not always have to take the form of direct quotations, which are needed only when the actual words are important to your argument. In other cases, it is enough to refer the reader to the pertinent lines, with a brief parenthetical reference to the act/scene/line numbers. (See the topic prompts for examples of the appropriate format.)
You are welcome to draw on any interpretative proposals provided in Andrew Gurr’s annotations to the text, but you should not expect your reader to accept any such claims simply on Gurr’s authority. (Bear in mind that the annotations typically address points that the editor deems obscure or controversial, and that the space constraints of the format prevent him from fully explaining the reason for thinking so, or for preferring the interpretation offered to another one.)
When glossing words in the text that are used in a sense that is obsolete or otherwise unconventional, you should provide a reference to corresponding definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. (Bear in mind that even a historical dictionary is ultimately just based on the compilers’ inferences about how words have been used; at the time Shakespeare wrote, there were no English-language dictionaries at all.)
You are not expected to draw on other secondary sources, and you are discouraged from doing so. (If you do choose to refer to any such sources, you are expected to cite them explicitly for any ideas or interpretative claims that you find in them, even if the same ideas had occurred to you separately.) The use of GPT or any other AI or LLM program is strictly prohibited.
As stated in the instructions, your essay should have a well-focused thesis, addressing a genuine live question of interpretation. You needn’t limit the essay to ‘proving’ a single proposition- the thesis may instead serve as the leading interpretative proposition the acceptance of which would make further claims possible. The aim is to offer a contribution, however modest, to an enlarged understanding of Richard II as a complex work of dramatic literature. To that end, you should be sure to consider: (a) the proximate dramatic context, in relation to the action taking place; (a) the precise, literal sense of what is being said in the passage discussed, as the speaker’s response to the situation (and disclosure of the speaker’s self-understanding in relation to it); and (c) the significance of figurative language, in its evocations and ambiguities. It is it is not sufficient simply to provide a paraphrase the gist of the passage you discuss, or to speculate loosely on the speaker’s beliefs or motives.
To reiterate: the point is to make a potential contribution to the understanding of the work under discussion as a work of dramatic literature. It is a work of drama that consists in human characters speaking to another, in particular situations— responding to the situations in which they find themselves, and thereby affecting that situation (or not) for themselves and one another. This does not mean that their utterances are intended to inform us of their self-understanding— on the contrary: the point is just that it’s their understanding of what would be a suitable thing to say, in the situation. An understanding of a work such as this must begin by attempting to understand the spoken words as the utterances of the speakers, expressive of their own self-understanding in the situation. An effective contribution to understanding the work will help to make sense of the utterances in this way. However, this should not be taken as an invitation to speculate loosely about the characters’ psychology or motives, beyond what is stated or implied in the text. Where the text is genuinely ambiguous, opaque, or equivocal, the task of interpretation is not to dispel these features but to understand how they operate, as constitutive features of the work.
Bear in mind that you are writing for a reader who might not share your opinions, and who has no reason to take an interest in those opinions unless you can give a persuasive reason for adopting them. You may safely presume that the reader has an interest in gaining a richer understanding of this work, and you may presume that the reader is open-minded enough to entertain fresh perspectives. But it’s up to you to establish and sustain your claim on the reader’s attention, by making it clear what you have on offer, and why it’s worth taking up.
It’s entirely appropriate to venture claims which are potentially risky (i.e., controversial)— or else you’d merely be stating the obvious, making no real claim on the reader’s attention. But in order to sustain such a claim on the reader’s attention, you need to show why the risks are worth taking, In other words, you need to make a persuasive case for accepting your interpretative proposals, in the interest of gaining a more comprehensive and satisfactory understanding of the topic (i.e., the work of literature being discussed).
Although you are certainly not expected to discuss every detail of the selected passages, you are nonetheless responsible to take those details reasonably into account in your interpretation, as well as their occasioning context in the drama as a whole. Your reader wants to come to a better understanding of the text, so you owe it to the reader to handle the details responsibly.
