Overview
Little do today's high school students realize that the issues with which they are faced - single parent families, sibling rivalry, conflicts, and betrayals within their family units - are also problems confronted by families during the Elizabethan period, in which Shakespeare lived and wrote his plays. King Lear, who is a single father raising three daughters, and his cohort, Gloucester, who is likewise a single father with two sons - one of whom is illegitimate - suffer all the trials and tribulations of parent-child relationships that students wade through with their parents and siblings today. Likewise, the siblings in these two families bicker, love, laugh, and suffer through the gamut of emotions today's teenagers go through within their family units. (11) Just as students are very familiar with the people who make up their family dynamic, we will study the characters in King Lear in depth, searching for comparable familiarity, to draw parallels and observe contrasts within today's family units.
When Lear asks, "Tell me, my daughters, / Which of you shall we say doth love us most, / That we our largest bounty may extend / Where merit doth most challenge it?", Lear's two oldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, skillfully tell him whatever he wants to hear in order to receive a large share of his kingdom, although their sincerity is dubious at best. However, Lear's youngest and most beloved daughter, Cordelia, believes she should be honest with him in expressing her feelings when she comments, "Unhappy that I am, / I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, / I love your majesty / According to my bond, nor more nor less"; her honesty leads to her downfall within the family. When she states that she "cannot heave my heart into my mouth", she expresses her difficulty in making her inner self visible to her father; she is more concerned with maintaining her integrity than with protecting her father's feelings. (7) Cordelia may be interpreted as being such a na?ve innocent that she really believes her truthfulness will prevail, and she will remain in her father's good graces. However, Lear's response of "nothing can come of nothing" and his disowning of Cordelia sets the tragedy in motion.
As the tragedy unfolds, Goneril's husband, Albany, reaches a new level of awareness about the nature of his wife: "Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; / Filths savour but themselves, / What have you done? / Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed?" Albany believes that an evil, vile person like Goneril can only perceive wickedness as good, while she accepts virtue as being toxic and distasteful: "See thyself, devil. / Proper deformity shows not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman ... / Howe'er thou art a fiend, / A woman's shape doth shield thee." Goneril involves herself in an affair with Edmund, which adds to her already immoral behavior, which she has plainly demonstrated toward her husband, her father, and her sisters. Regan goes hand in hand with her older sister; Albany calls her a "gilded serpent". She is ruthless and aggressive, and vies for Edmund's affections against her sister. Regan revels in violent and cruel acts, such as the blinding of Gloucester. When Cornwall gouges out one of Gloucester's eyes and stomps on it, Regan comments, "One side will mock another; t'other one too", indicating that his other eye should suffer the same fate. Once both eyes are plucked out, she demands he be "thrust out at the gates" so that he can "smell his was to Dover." She is relentless, and since such evil people dismiss goodness as hypocrisy, Regan never appreciates her virtuous sister, Cordelia, and in fact, she actively dislikes her. Both Goneril and Regan are ultimately recognized for what they are: "they are cultivated ladies of the court on the outside - elegant, well-spoken, and controlled - but inside they are fiends, serpents, dogs. It is not just that their true intentions are hidden; they are actually different kinds of being beneath the silky surface, creatures of another species. Ferocious killers lurk behind the ladylike appearance, occasionally bursting to the surface with fangs flaring." (12) Regan and Goneril are both compared to wild, predatory animals in the play: "It is harder to tell whose fangs are sharper - the lion's or the sisters'."
Cordelia never really stands a chance of being understood by her father when both of her sisters conspire against her. She is the youngest daughter and her father's favorite. However, because she refuses to compromise her integrity and fawn over her father, she is disinherited. She tries to tell her father that when she marries, she will only be able to give him half of her love because the other half is reserved for her husband, but Lear refuses to accept her response. His behavior might have been different if he had a female counterpart to offer her input, but the absence of a mother figure makes Lear's treatment of Cordelia unforgivable because there is no form of nurturing or forgiveness, most often attributed to mother figures, even from her two sisters. He ultimately realizes that Cordelia is his true and faithful daughter. When he reaches the state of being a poor outcast after Goneril and Regan send him away, he better understands the plight he cast upon Cordelia: "Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless night, / How shall you houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you / From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them /And show the heavens more just." Although Cordelia is married and living with the King of France, she was unceremoniously exiled from her home and her father, whom she had loved all her life. She may feel obligated to care for France because he is her husband, but she has suffered the loss of familial love. Lear also experiences this significant loss but comes to have a greater comprehension of the poor and homeless that he previously scorned, thus instilling in him compassion and a broader vision of social justice. In a paradoxical sense, he is a richer man now than when he was the undisputed king of Britain. In this same vein, when she reconciles with her father, Cordelia learns to put on an act for the sake of other people's feelings, rather than valuing her honesty and integrity above all, and she understands that kind words can be better than the truth.
Lear's ultimate madness sobers him, and he reconciles with Cordelia: "Pray, do not mock. / I am a very foolish, fond old man, / Fourscore and upward, and to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / Methinks I should know you, and know this man; / Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant / What place this is; and all the skill I have / Remembers not these garments; nor I know not / Where I did lodge last night. / Do not laugh at me, / For as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child, Cordelia." He is no longer the powerful, egotistical, arrogant king but is, quite literally, a rather decrepit old man full of self-doubt, perhaps recovering from a serious mental blackout, which may have been partially brought about by the deception of Goneril and Regan.
Gloucester mirrors Lear's behavior in a way when he mistakenly sides with his illegitimate son, Edmund, over his legitimate child, Edgar, and in the end, he suffers for this decision. Edmund, the bastard son, deceives Gloucester by pretending to have a traitorous letter penned by Edgar. Gloucester, convinced of Edgar's perfidy, tells Edmund, "Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing." Edgar, who is unjustly rejected by his father, roams around in the guise of a beggar, Poor Tom. Edmund's very first act is to make his father believe that Edgar is about to deceive and betray him. However, Edmund believes that he is possibly evil by nature and not by intention when he remarks, "Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature." When Gloucester is betrayed by Edmund and struck blind by Regan and Cornwall, his physical blindness allows him to see that "Edgar was abused." Edgar, who is forced to disguise himself as the beggar, Poor Tom, to survive, although he is a virtuous man, makes his father believe that he is saving him from suicide at the white cliffs of Dover, although they are nowhere near the cliffs, thus allowing Edgar to emerge as a truly virtuous hero.
A major theme in King Lear is the intolerance, deception, and betrayal the family members have for each other, both among Lear and his daughters and Gloucester and his sons. (10) The play presents an interpretation of a seriously dysfunctional family. Lear brings out the worst in his daughters Goneril and Regan by allowing these two women to triumph as deceitful, greedy, manipulative, foul, loathsome creatures who easily give rise to suffering and discord within their family unit. When they achieve their self-serving goals of attaining their father's entire kingdom, they vie for the same man, Edmund, and eventually evoke the downfall of each other. Goneril's husband, Albany, is good at heart, and although he eventually denounces the evil trio of Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall, he is slow to act and indecisive. Although Cordelia initially embodies a positive female image, Lear is irrational in his decisions toward her due to his ideas of how a female should honor her father. She is dishonorably cast out of the family and forced to marry the King of France, a man she neither knows well nor probably wants to marry. He is clearly the second choice after Burgundy refuses to marry her because she is disinherited and has no dowry. Additionally, she is having to leave her homeland to live in a foreign environment among total strangers; she is removed from all that is familiar to her. This theme of family dysfunctionality transcends time, thus allowing today's students to identify with the hostility that ensues between Lear and his daughters as well as between the three siblings. Students today experience similar events in their lives because so many of them either live in single parent families, with grandparents or other relatives, or in other undesirable environments, yet they manage to survive. They can convey their feelings about Lear and Gloucester and their familial relationships compared to how their circumstances may parallel Lear's or Gloucester's.
Another strong theme that aligns with the familial relationships addresses the battle between good and evil among the family members. (4) The main characters are betrayed by the people closest to them, the people they should love the best. Although the Lear's and Gloucester's betrayal of their children is basically unintentional, the other children deceive their fathers due to their greed and their hunger for power. Lear believes Goneril when she says, "Sir, I love you more that word can wield the matter; / Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty", and likewise, he believes Regan when she remarks, "...I profess / Myself an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense possesses, / And find I am alone felicitate / In your dear Highness's love." Even when Cordelia brings it to his attention that "Why have my sisters husbands, if they say / They love you all? ... / Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters / To love my father all," he pays no attention. Only later when these two eldest daughters rebuke him and cast him out of their homes is he driven to understand the true meaning of love and devotion, which Cordelia felt for him all along. Similarly, Gloucester too quickly believes Edmund when he is told that Edgar, his biological son, is set on betraying him and is, in fact, plotting his death. Shakespeare presents two patriarchal families and tackles problems arising within single parent families.
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