Survey of English Literature I - Assignment 17 James Madison University

Instructions: This assignment can be hand-written as long as it's legible and on a full-size sheet of paper. It will be graded only as an acceptable or unacceptable effort.

• Choose any two of the monologues below, and for each of the two you choose, think of at least two different directorial input an actor get about how to say these lines. (For example, if you were looking at Cordelia's lines to her father in Act 1 Scene 1, you would perhaps suggest that an actor could be directed to play Cordelia as very haughty and proud in these lines, or she could be directed to be sweet and conciliatory or to act upset and uncertain, and so on.) Some of you ideas may be attempted by an actor in Monday's class. Here are the actual monologues you can choose from:
  1. Lear calling for Nature to curse Goneril in Act 1, scene 4
  2. Lear, in Act 2, scene 4, after Goneril and Regan have ganged up to determine Lear needs no retinue at all -- the lines starting with "O, reason not the need!"
  3. Lear's "conversation" with the storm at the begining of, Act3, scene 2.
  4. Edgar, after he has fought with Edmund and then revealed himself in Act 5, scene 3. Specifically, his reply when Albany asks him to explain "Where have you hid yourself? How have you known the miseries of your father?"
  5. Lear's last lines in Act 5.