Lesson Overview

Students will identify and explore several symbols in William Shakespeare’s King Lear and explain how and why they are used to add meaning to the text. The worksheet accompanying this lesson can be completed as students read the text or once they have completed reading the play.

Materials

  • King Lear by William Shakespeare
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Lesson Objectives

1. Students will identify symbols in King Lear to analyze the central meaning of the text. 

2. Students will understand that symbols do not have one-to-one correlation with a meaning. Their meanings are open-ended and organic, not defined and static. They are topics for discussion and exploration, not rote answers. 

3. Students will analyze the purpose and function of each symbol presented from King Lear.

Instructional Sequence

1. Explain the difference between a symbol and a sign. 

Explain that both signs and symbols are concrete images that mean or represent abstract ideas. However, signs represent one idea, while symbols represent many possibilities. Explain that the map in Act 1, Scene 1 is a sign if you think it only represents Lear’s land, giving the map and the land one-to-one correspondence. Add that when you start to think of the map as representing Lear’s land, power, ego, and authority, it becomes a symbol. A rose bush, for example, may be a symbol of love, beauty, fragility, danger, time, symmetry, balance, bloodshed, or purity, depending on how it is used and what meaning a writer wants to convey. A rose is usually a symbol, not a sign. Guide students to understand that symbols convey several layers of meaning, whereas signs convey only one. A stop sign at a street corner means stop—no more, no less. 

2. Discuss one example from the text. 

Pass out the Scrutinizing Symbols Worksheet. 

Point students to the symbol of the crown starting on line 140 in Act 1, Scene 4 (No Fear edition). In this scene, the Fool is playing around with Lear, teasing him about his crown, but the crown in this instance represents many different abstractions. Have a pair of volunteers read the exchange between Lear and the Fool aloud as the rest of the class listens. 

Through discussion, help students understand that crown in this scene refers to the literal top part of a head, the round metal headwear that sits on a king’s head, and figuratively, the kingdom that Lear has “cut in half.” Lear speaks of his “bald crown” (his head) and a “golden” crown (his kingship). Explore other associations with crown found outside of the play, including: the Crown of Thorns, heavenly crowns, halos, nuptial crowns, the crowns of Thai dancers, laurel wreaths for athletes, etc. Crowns can be ornate or simple and are sometimes bejeweled. The word can designate the top of a mountain, the visible part of a tree or plant, a culminating achievement, the top of a tooth, or an old British coin. As a verb, to crown can refer to childbirth, the moment when the top of a baby’s head is first visible, or to a rapid fire burning through a forest. All these definitions inform the symbolic possibilities for the image of crown when it’s used in literature. 

Explain to students that occasionally the etymology of a word can help us deepen our understanding of a symbol. Some language historians suggest that crown derives from crow and was used to describe all kinds of curved or hooked objects, such as the beak or claws of the bird.  

Help students see that a word web is a useful way to explore a symbol by filling in one on the board as a class with the word crown in the middle. Have students return to the exchange between Lear and the Fool, and let them free associate about the word’s possibilities. Record their responses and ideas in the web on the board. Have them fill in the web on their worksheets as well.

Next, point students to Cordelia’s description of Lear in Act 4, Scene 4, lines 1–7 (No Fear edition). She states he is: 

Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.  

From Cordelia’s words, we learn that Lear’s golden crown has been replaced with one made of wildflowers and weeds. Help students understand that this new crown symbolizes the fact that Lear’s power has been threatened just as his brain is threatened, and that although he remains king, his crown of weeds becomes part of his ridicule, much like Jesus’s crown of thorns. Lear is depicted wearing this crown of weeds when he enters “mad” in Act 4, Scene 6. 

3. Explain how the wheel has been used as a symbol throughout history and complete the wheel web. 

Here are some examples to share with students: 

Fortune was traditionally portrayed as a woman turning a wheel. Fortune’s wheel could bring a person to great heights and also to the lowest depths and could be turned at any moment.  

In ancient philosophy, the Rota Fortunae (Wheel of Fortune) is a symbol of the randomness of life.  

The wheel is used in the famous illustration in Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century text De Casibus Virorum Illustrium and other visual representations, too.  

Today, the wheel is used in the long-running television game show Wheel of Fortune, and in the card game Magic: The Gathering.  

After sharing these examples, ask: Why is the wheel a symbol, not a sign?

Share the following four examples from the text, all of which utilize the symbol wheel: 

Example 1: 

KENT:
Fortune, good night. Smile once more. Turn thy wheel.
(No Fear: 2.2.166)  

Example 2:

FOOL:
All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men, and there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him that’s stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it.
(No Fear: 2.4.61–66) 

Example 3: 

LEAR:
You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
(No Fear: 4.7.43–46) 

Example 4:  

EDMUND:
The wheel is come full circle. I am here.
(No Fear: 5.3.185) 

Now have students fill in their word webs for wheel.

4. Have students explore other symbols from the text. 

Instruct students to find and explore other symbols from the play. They can work in pairs or in small groups to choose a symbol, locate textual evidence, explore literal and figurative meanings, and make associations with the symbol in other pieces of literature, films, and in the modern world. 

Have each group share their webs with the class. 

5. Why use symbols?

Use all the details that students have accumulated to inspire and fuel a discussion of this question: Why do writers use symbols to create or enhance meaning?  

Have them apply other pieces of literature and their famous symbols, such as the embroidered A in The Scarlet Letter, the ring in The Lord of the Rings, the rainbow in The Wizard of Oz, the conch shell in Lord of the Flies. 

Some possible answers include: 

Writers may use symbols:

  • as a kind of literary shorthand

  • as a puzzle for readers to unlock

  • because they are entertaining 

  • because they evoke universal and visceral responses

  • as a way to unify a piece of writing around a central image and idea

Differentiated Instruction

This activity can be modified to help all students access learning.
Decrease difficulty

Supply students with a list of possible symbols to choose from, such as blindness, the storm, animals, the bow and arrow, hollowness, babies and children, letters, the stars and planets, disease, or nakedness.

Increase difficulty

Challenge students to relate the etymology of the word symbol, from the ancient symbolum, “to cast or throw two things together,” to the word as a modern literary term. Invite them to research the artistic movement known as Symbolism, which originated in the late nineteenth century in France, Russia, and Belgium and included artists such as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe.

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