Shakespeare's King Lear Analysis -Stoicism, Depression, Redemption

8/6/2019 Shakespeare's King Lear Analysis -Stoicism, Depression, Redemption

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may. This is what is redeeming about life. It is also a reward in itself, for the greater struggles you must

pass through, the stronger you grow. The closer to living in accordance with nature you become.

Kent In Kent we see the same themes repeated. He is loyal to King Lear to the end and will offer himgood counsel and honesty, in spite of the great risk in incurring a king's anger. He could do no else and

still be able to look at himself. Even when he is banished by Lear, he returns to serve him.

Lear's Mistake In great contrast to these wise characters, Lear is the true fool. He is a vain man who

doesn't understand the worth of actions as compared to words. When Cordelia refuses to stoop to

flattery to get material goods, he tells her:thy truth then be thy dower.

And so we see Kent trying to talk sense into Lear saying Nor are these empty-hearted whose lowsound reverbs no hollowness. Her words are majestic simplicity, the elegant lines of Venus of Milo,

but he sees only barrenness. Or as later Albany would say, Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile:

Filths savour but themselves....Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. But

this is lost on him.

Shakespeare believed that the straight and narrow path is by far the more difficult one, being fairly

inevitably accompanied by suffering. But, in the end, the bad are their own greatest victims. In his

tragedies, they do not escape unscathed. While both the good and the bad characters die, it's better tohave lived the life of Cordelia or Kent who sought to be blameless than to live the life of Lear (or

Edmund, Goneril, etc) who lived a life based on fleeting emotions and desires rather than eternal

principles. Lear is not insane in the beginning of the story, not more than the rest of us. He's unwise andguided by bankrupt principles. Regan says of the king, he hath ever but slenderly known himself, a

reference to Greek philosophy. The story is supposed to illustrate the ravages of such a life because for

all Lear has accomplished, without wisdom he comes to nothing.

The other primary principle of Greek philosophy is also present (the first being Know thyself--

inscribed on the Temple of Delphi), which is Moderation in all things. Every extreme is bad.KingLearis almost like the story of Achilles. When his pride is wounded he's content to let the Greek armybe destroyed rather than swallow his pride. While Achilles eventually realizes he is wrong before it's

too late and he leads the Greeks to victory, Lear does not. Death flourishes around him.

Insanity or Wisdom - It becomes clear by looking at other works of Shakespeare that a theme is that

what society considers insanity can sometimes be wisdom, a keener perception. As in Hamlet, it's

logical to be pessimistic much of the time, in this world full of shadows, and so we see that Lear

eventually does go insane throughout the play, as does Edgar. I include the fool in this discussionbecause it sticks with the theme of reason where everybody expects nonsense.

For this reason, many of the lines in his plays have a double meaning. For example, when the Frenchking is asking for Cordelia's hand in marriage he says,

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor,Most choice forsaken, and most lived despised.

What is taken to be madness (a king marrying a woman with no property), is actually truth, in that he

sees perhaps more merit in the marriage this way. Another example of this double-speak is when Learruns into Kent (in disguise) outside the hut during the storm, and Kent says, I do profess to be no less

than what I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust... Kent clearly is more than what he

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The entire character of the fool further illustrates this point. The fool is, of course, wiser than the king,

and can see the political events in the play for what they are. Nevertheless, he is fated to play quite a

different role in this world. Humorously, he tells the king that though his royal title can be taken away,the title of fool cannot; that thou was born with.

And it's through the fool that Shakspeare once again expresses Stoic values:Have more than thou showest,

Speak less than thou knowest,Lend less than thou owest...

Yet in the end the fool, too, seems to become a victim of the King. It's often portrayed that he is killed

by Lear during the storm, for we never see him again after that scene.

Edmund and Edgar - The other plot in the book is that between Edmund, Edgar, and Gloucester.

Edmund is Gloucester's bastard son and he deeply resents his position in society. He creates a plot to

make it look like Edgar, the legitimate son, has been plotting to kill their father in the belief that This

policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us

till our old cannot relish them. So, there's a parallel here. We first see Lear's two bad daughters

screwing him (and everybody else) over, and then we have Edmund screwing both his father andbrother over. That both of King Lear's evil daughters love Edmund is a further testament to his

character. Are people so much elevated over the less-conscious beings as we imagine ourselves?

As a result of Edmund's actions, Edgar is forced to debase himself to stay alive:

Brought near to beast: my face Ill grime with filth,Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots

A line of Edmund's is very revealing about the theme of this subplot as well. He said it's when we are

sick in fortuneoften the surfeit [excess] of our own behaviorwe make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenlycompulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and

adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.

What he's saying is that people abhor accepting responsibility for their own actions. It's very painful to

fail another person and especially to deal with the consequences of it. This idea again goes back to the

ancient ideas of wisdom. In those days, people were not so quick to blame others. If you killed

somebody, it could have been Mars making you do it. There was a removal of responsibility for boththe good and bad that you did. We were all on a stage, and the gods manipulated us as they pleased. Or

as he says in King Lear, As flies to wanton boys, we are to the gods; They kill us for sport!

In Judaism and Christianity, there's also an element of thisevil spirits, the devil who tempts us, etc--

but there's a much greater emphasis on personal responsibility, perhaps due to the division into good

and evil that there traditionally was not before. In any case, the principle idea is that those who useforces out of our control as an excuse to justify their actions are cowardly, but those who take the

lessons to heart and move forward with their life are good.

The Storm During the famous storm scene with the fool and Lear, the latter pulling out his hair and

screaming to the skies, basically punishing himself because nothing can actually be gained by that

behavior. This is not the beginning of his wisdom as some might suppose; it's his rock bottom. In his


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depression he wishes for mankind to be destroyed:

Smite flat the thuck rotundity o'the world!Crack nature's moulds, all termins spill at once

That make ungrateful man!

The fool leads him to shelter in a hut, yet he's still unable to see outside of himself because when he

meets a poverty-stricken Edgar, he assumes that Edgar too has given everything away, unable to picturedepression on other terms. Rather, his true turning point is when he tears off his clothes. This is when

he rejects his former value system. Yet his victims keep piling up, and the fool is often portrayed dying

when they are in the hut.

Briefly returning to the theme of destruction, there's recently been a surge of arguments for anti-

natalism: the belief that one should not have children because life is suffering. Shakespeare would have

been appalled at this idea. He's a huge fan of having children, as evidenced by his many sonnetsencouraging reproduction. Yet in the play we see Lear wishing his daughter would be barren:To make this creature fruitful:

Into her womb convey sterility:

Dry up her organs of increase,

And from her derogate body never springA baby to honour her!

I believe that Shakespeare meant this to be a sign of excess, immoderation and irrationality. This is not

the reaction he would intend for us to have toward the world, though he has compassion for it. Rather,our solace is in kindness.

Kindness Is Redemption - We see that the moments that are redeeming in the story are moments of

kindness and goodness. That is what makes life worth living, in the end, for Shakespeare. But I thinkthat he sees these moments as a grand of sand in the sad ocean. Chuck Palaniuk expressed something

similar when he writes in Fight Club that, One minute was enough...a person had to work hard for it,

but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect fromperfection. Kindness is our saving grace, the spots on the leopard and the bustling of the spring.

Edgar and Cordelia both undertake acts of kindness when they would have some justification in actingotherwise. Cordelia takes lead of the French army when her husband bails, in the belief she's doing the

fighting for her father. Edgar is put into a position of leading his father Gloucester (who abandoned

him), now blinded, to a cliff. But instead of taking him for him to kill himself, there he leads him to a

normal field and saves him. Thus, just as he can have compassion for a person seeking to end thehuman race, or to kill themselves, he doesn't believe this is the answer. Plays are, of course written, not

for the characters in them but for the audience. Live justly, he's telling the audience, while you still can.

It's not too late.

Hamlet and Lear Hamlet and King Lear are often said to be Shakespeare's two greatest works, and

both are tragedies. However, there's a huge divide. Where Hamlet knows too much about life, hasgazed too deeply into its state of affairs, Lear has failed to gaze into the nature of life. When he finally

does see things for how they are, he is happy; the opposite feeling takes hold of Hamlet.

Is there then an inconsistency in Shakespeare's worldview? I do not have a definitive answer for this,

but it is possible that he felt that his philosophy was not adequately expressed in Hamlet, written about

five years earlier. It reads more like the work of a young man, one who sees the travesty in life but does


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not yet have an adequate way to cope. Perhaps he learned to find happiness in spite of the bad around

him. Yet Shakespeare was not happy with the way thatLearturned out. Harold Bloom writes that he

was the the Arabian moon in Wallace Stevens that 'throws his own stars around the floor.' Maybe he

decided that stoicism was a cop out. We'll never know.

English Context -

Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the

sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies...in palaces,

treason....We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and allruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our grave.

In other words, we suffer disappointment at every turn, and especially from the things we once thought

were secure. In his own time, Shakespeare felt that the stone arch of English society [was] collapsing(Source). He saw the Catholic sin of usury inevitably transformed into the Protestant virtue of

banking for example (Source). But rather than any specific facet of society, it's the cumulative reversal

of values that irked him. Thus, Shakespeare saw the way that Lear bargains about the number ofknights that he is allowed and pits his daughters against each other in a verbal contest for his land as

perverse, as perverse as the new merchant class in his own times.

This is especially reflected in the fool's words (and one of my favorite passages):

When priests are more in word than matter;When brewers mar their malt with water;

When nobles are their tailors' tutors;

No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors;

When usurers tell their gold I' the field,

And bawds and whores do churches build

Then shall the realm of AlbionCome to great confusion

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Long live the Shakespearean embrace of reality.

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Shakespeare's King Lear Analysis -Stoicism, Depression, Redemption