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The Edyth Jeffrey Shakespeare Prize

The Blair Academy English Department is proud to recognize the following students who are recipients of the Edyth Jeffrey Shakespeare Prize for proficiency and excellence in Shakespeare studies for the 2006-2007 academic year:

Michael Breslin ’09
Matthew Cable ’09
Tyler Browse ’08
Olivia Trozze ’08
Timothy Peacock ’08

Click on each name above to download and read their prize-winning papers. Two of the papers (Breslin and Cable) were formal, analytical papers produced as part of a Hamlet unit in the sophomore honors course. The other three papers were timed responses produced as part of a King Lear unit in the junior honors course and were in response to a sophisticated prompt (reproduced here).

   King Lear is widely regarded as Shakespeare’s crowning artistic achievement. The scenes in which a mad Lear rages naked on a stormy heath against his deceitful daughters and nature itself are considered by many scholars to be the finest example of tragic lyricism in the English language. Shakespeare took his main plot line of an aged monarch abused by his children from a folk tale that appeared first in written form in the 12th century and was based on spoken stories that originated much further into the Middle Ages. In several written versions of "Lear," the king does not go mad, his "good" daughter does not die, and the tale has a happy ending.
    This is not the case with Shakespeare’s Lear, a tragedy of such consuming force that audiences and readers are left to wonder whether there is any meaning to the physical and moral carnage with which King Lear concludes. Like the noble Kent, seeing a mad, pathetic Lear with the murdered Cordelia in his arms, the profound brutality of the tale compels us to wonder, “Is this the promised end?” That very question stands at the divide between traditional critics of King Lear who find a heroic pattern in the story and modern readers who see no redeeming or purgative dimension to the play at all, the message being the bare futility of the human condition with Lear as Everyman.
    Discuss the conclusion of the play, and address the issues which Moore outlines regarding “the promised end” as part of a “heroic pattern” or a message of “bare futility.”

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