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Abstract

This article studies Lear’s madness in Shakespeare’s King Lear as a rhetoric of the unconscious. It argues that Lear’s mad speech should not be read only through Elizabethan psychology or as a simple consequence of excessive passion, but as a meaningful discourse that reveals hidden psychic materials, memories, conflicts, and truths. Drawing on psychoanalytic perspectives, especially Freud’s reflections on dreams and the unconscious, the article shows how Lear’s language transforms madness into a mode of revelation. Through images, metaphors, repetitions, and apparently disordered statements, Lear exposes injustice, hypocrisy, social violence, and the hidden tensions of the play. The study therefore presents madness as a dramatic and linguistic device through which Shakespeare gives access to the unconscious dimensions of both the character and the human condition.

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