King Lear is a tragic hero, doomed by the misfortune of his own error. A reigning example of how a noble man can be defeated by his flaws, he drives himself to the brink of insanity. King Lear’s flaws are that he is arrogant, prideful, and biased. It’s the reason for his insanity that brings out strong emotions in the reader. King Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan are insincere about their love for him; they give a fantastical view of how daughters should love their father. Cordelia, however, gives her father a realistic view of a daughter’s love, which he isn’t equipped to handle. King Lear appears to be a good man, if not a bit egotistical and foolish. It is very easy to like him. Yet, consider that Goneril and Reagan may have turned out the way they did because their father has a clear biases, a favorite child in Cordelia. The idea that a parent has a favorite child is conceivable, yet to express that emotion so clearly can be damaging to a child’s psyche.
King Lear has always approached his daughters as the king, with an extreme expression of authority. He never visited his daughters as simply a father. It’s a shock to him when reality hits, and the love he thought he had was simply an illusion, and his only saving grace was Cordelia. At the end of the day, King Lear learns what it’s like to feel other people’s pain, but sadly with no rewards, he must find company in insanity.
Category Archives: King Lear
Violence in King Lear
As one of the key terms mentioned in class is man, the acts of violence present in King Lear (though there are much more violent plays in Shakespeare’s repertoire) are key to understanding not only our similarities to Shakespeare’s audience in the attraction to graphic displays but also how violence reflects the nature of man.
In all fairness, the play wasn’t always as received well for the violence and suffering it depicts as it is presently. The tide turned for King Lear after the English Civil War (1642- 1651). Hence, a much more palatable version emerged by playwright Nahum Tate that occupied its own moment of popularity in history. Interestingly enough, in Tate’s adaptation The History of King Lear the character of the Fool is completely omitted.
Not only does violence play out in the form of a storm, but in Act 3 scene 7 we see the plucking of Gloucester’s eyes at the hands of Cornwall and Regan. The violence of nature contrasts to that of man. In Cornwall’s pursuit of authority, he is willing to perform the most violent of means against someone much older than him who has provided shelter. His actions beget more violence, and as we will find further on, lead to a devastating fate for Cornwall.
The violence that nature shows brings characters like Lear, Edgar, Kent and the Fool together, while the violence of man unites the more wicked of them all: Cornwall, Goneril, Regan and Edmund. In this grouping, we also see another way that the characters of the play are divided. There are those who act and those who suffer. In this division, there is *seemingly* some justice in that those who act become the source of their own ill-fate, but judging by the sentence passed down on Kent for honesty and Gloucester for naivety, suffering can come to those who do not deserve it as well. The conclusion that emerges in the following two acts will reflect how justice doesn’t always come to only those who deserve it, which is perhaps one of the most difficult points for the audience to come to terms with.The good guy doesn’t always win and the suffering that the bad guy gets in no way makes right that wrong.