Thug Notes breaks down the plot of King Lear in a way that is easy and fun to listen to. It’s as informal as one can get. The thing that I want to focus on the most is the analysis. Some videos talk about the acting that brought the play to life, and some articles/essays talk about the themes of family and relationships, but Thug Notes brings forward a theme that I hadn’t seen before: loss. He says that one of the biggest themes in King Lear is loss — “loss of power, love, life, and sight.” Loss of power is clearly demonstrated through King Lear handing over his kingdom and thus, having no more power over his daughters. King Lear also experiences loss of love through the two daughters who expel him and his soldiers from their homes and out into a raging storm. Loss of life is inevitable in a Shakespeare tragedy; in this one, only two characters remain alive in the end. And as for loss of sight, Gloucester had his eyes gouged out.

Another thing that I really liked about Thug Notes’s analysis is that they included important quotes from the play itself. The first one, “The tempest in my mind/Doth from my senses take all feeling else,/Save what beast here: filial ingratitude,” illustrates the process of King Lear going mad through imagery of a storm which shows how unstable his mind is. King Lear knows that there is a storm brewing in his head but he is mainly concerned with how ungrateful Goneril and Regan are. Clearly, he has much worse things to be worried about. The second important quote is by Gloucester: “I have no way,/and therefore want no eyes./I stumbled when I saw.” This one quote alone summed up the motif of loss of sight. Gloucester doesn’t care about losing his eyes anymore when he realizes what had actually happened — that Edmund is the terrible child who had tricked him, and that Edgar is the good son. He couldn’t see the truth even when he did have the ability to see so what use were his eyes anyway? King Lear also couldn’t see the truth when he asked his daughters to profess their love to him. He was too self-centered and only listened to what he wanted to hear. Both King Lear and Gloucester lacked the ability to see through the lies.