King Lear
The play serves as a fine example of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and contains a great number of the hallmarks
of the playwright’s works. King Lear was written in 1605, amongst the middle of the Shakespearian tragedies. The timing is further significant because of the nature of hierarchical structures in Elizabethan and early Jacobean societies. The deference which must be paid to those socially outranking you comes to create bitterness and tension within the story.
King Lear, the long-reigning King of England, has decided to abdicate his responsibilities as King, dividing the kingdom between his three
daughters. However, any prudence in this division is lost by his decision to split the land according to the strength of his daughters’ professions of love for him, as well as his intention to keep his entourage of knights and command all the respect befitting of a King without the accompanying responsibility. Cordelia, Lear’s favourite daughter (again, part of his flaw, for love for one’s children ought not be weighted particularly towards just one) cannot play his game, fails to profess her love in exuberant words, and Lear’s anger shows, causing her banishment, as well as that of the Duke of Kent, attempting to intercede. His other daughters, Goneril and Regan, slowly but calculatedly cut his retinue leaving him at rock bottom in a thunderstorm, a fraction of the man he once was.
Meanwhile, the Duke of Gloucester shows similar folly in his treatment of his children. His legitimate child, Edgar, is forced to flee by the manipulations of his half-brother, the illegitimate Edmund. Though unloving of Edmund, Gloucester is all too ready to accept his suspicions, and Edmund surely ascends the ranks of power, gaining titles and credibility with each opportunistic lie. Edgar, meantime, is cast into the storm pretending to be a beggar, where he meets King Lear.
Lear, the tragic hero, must inevitably find his lowest point, and come to terms with himself before he can hope to discover clarity. In an extraordinary scene, his Fool (often played by the same actor who plays Cordelia, thereby closely aligning the two for the audience’s sake, as the former shows Lear through riddles his failure of filial duty to the latter) offers cryptic, mad-seeming insights, Edgar simulates madness to protect his identity, and Lear is in the full throes of madness. All the while, the dutiful Kent attends to them, pretending to be someone he is not just to serve his King. As the plot concludes, these threads of the story intertwine closely, as war falls, Cordelia returns, and order is finally restored amidst chaos and deception.
As a piece of Shakespearian writing, one is not short of motifs that recur, challenge and manifest themselves in different ways. Lear’s fundamental flaw is a combination of
blindness and irascibility, but his blindness to his responsibilities is what leads to his fall. Blindness is also present in Gloucester’s neglectful behaviour, before then being brutally replaced by genuine blindness. As for Goneril, Regan and Edmund, their insatiable ambition ultimately is their undoing. All the while, the themes of Justice and Reconciliation linger throughout the work, leaving us with a profoundly brilliant example of Shakespeaere’s treatment of many of the most important issues in life, both today and four hundred years before.