King Lear, Shakespeare’s tale of distorted expectations and painful illusions, provides a vivid description of the pervasive discontent accompanying modern life as well as excellent instruction for its cure. It was Shakespeare’s inspiration to distill in this story vivid prototypes. Indeed, there is a quality of divine inspiration and profound psychological insight in King Lear, it is in many ways a miracle play.
The Lear story is tragic, but it is not without hope or redemption. It shows us characters who are transformed. It must have been rare in Shakespeare’s day to find such a person, and it is even more rare today.
As the play opens, the king is about to make a foolish move. Lear has decided to retire and give away his kingdom to his three daughters. He announces that he will apportion the kingdom out by asking the daughters to proclaim how much they love their father. He pries the love out of them. Two of the daughters outdo themselves trying to please the king. Goneril, the oldest, speaks first, saying, “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter; / Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty; / Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare; / No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; / As much as child e’er loved, or father found; / A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable. / Beyond all manner of so much I love you.”
The youngest daughter, Cordelia, hears this spectacle of flattery for what it is. “Love, and be silent,” she says quietly to herself.
The king’s second daughter, Regan, gives another flowery, sentimental speech. Recall Sigmund Freud’s definition of sentimentality. He called it “repressed brutality.” When sentimentality gushes forth, you don’t have to wait very long for brutality to follow, as is painfully borne out in this story.
The two elder daughters give these elaborate, mushy speeches about how much they love their father. Their words are so stilted that they seem to be carefully rehearsed for the occasion rather than spontaneous. They sound immediately insincere, yet Lear is pleased by their polished rhetoric. Then Lear turns to his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and asks, “What about you?”
Cordelia prefers to say nothing, but her father insists that “nothing will come of nothing.”
Still, Cordelia demurs. She loves her father deeply, but she understates her affection. This is partly out of honesty and a distaste for hypocrisy, but it also relates to an instinct on her part that something is inherently wrong in what the king is doing.
“I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less,” Cordelia says. By bond, Cordelia means the natural obligation between child and parent.
In response to this quiet, honest statement, the king rages, storms about, and ultimately disinherits Cordelia. The angry king declares to his youngest daughter, “Better thou / Hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.”
Many people in our modern world are faced with the awful of dilemma of choosing between unreality or being left alone. If you don’t play along with the excesses of our time, you risk being ignored or even tossed aside.
The foolish king, like some would-be god bestowing boons, divides his kingdom up between the two false daughters. The duke of Burgundy, who has been courting Cordelia, leaves her flat when he learns that there will be no inheritance. So much for his love. He reacts like a good materialist, valuing social position, status, power, and possessions. For her honest response, poor Cordelia is abandoned. Luckily, the king of France agrees to take her in.
From this opening scene we already can see that Cordelia is the noblest figure in the story, perhaps one of the noblest characters in all of literature. Her attitude and her words are simple, even plain by modern standards. She offers King Lear the love that is fitting from a daughter—no more and no less.
Legitimate and Illegitimate Creations
Meanwhile, a parallel plot is developing. This story explores the same theme in a somewhat different manner. The earl of Gloucester, also a figure who is high in the court, has two sons, one legitimate and the other illegitimate. Gloucester jokes about the “accidental” birth of his second son, Edmund. He will soon disinherit his legitimate and loyal son, Edgar, as he falls victim to the conniving of his bastard offspring.
Are we so different from Lear and Gloucester? Each of us, in our interior court, produces both legitimate and illegitimate impulses and creations. These may be in our relationships, in our work, or in other parts of our lives. The story suggests that we must consider with care those energies and actions we choose to ally ourselves with and how we divide our resources.
Gloucester’s illegitimate son, Edmund, is consumed with ambition. He lives by the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. He is determined to surpass and destroy his brother, and so he forges a letter suggesting that their father be killed, signs Edgar’s name to it, and makes sure that it finds its way to Gloucester.
Just as Edmund schemes against his brother and hungers for his father’s wealth and title, Goneril and Regan, Lear’s older daughters, also begin to show their true colors once Cordelia is out of the way. In both the story of Lear and the secondary story of Gloucester, we see division and conflict.
As soon as Lear hands over his kingdom, Goneril and Regan become abusive to their father, dismissing his personal guards and thereby stripping the king of his dignity. A loyal supporter named Kent is put into the stocks. This is designed to further undercut and provoke the old king.
Goneril and Regan conspire with Edmund and decide to punish the earl of Gloucester, who has remained loyal to the king. One of the cold-hearted sisters says to hang him, and the other says to pluck out his eyes. We might recall their use of the metaphor of eyesight in an earlier sentimental speech. Goneril had declared her love to be “dearer than eyesight.” But now we see where beloved eyesight went: it is to be brutally plucked out.
The metaphor of sight and blindness runs like a continuous thread throughout this story. Those characters who grow and transform begin the play with inner blindness but eventually gain a special kind of vision.
The Dark Night of the Soul
Showered with insults and disrespect, Lear is overcome with rage. He is turned away from the castle, and he sets off into the wild heathlands. It is night, he is wet, and he is miserable. A storm rages through the sky, echoing Lear’s own inner turmoil. He appears mad. While shivering out in the rain, Lear speaks to a loyal servant who still attends him. These sublime words may be the most important in Shakespeare’s entire play. Lear turns to the servant and asks, “How dost, my boy? Art cold?” For the first time, the king is paying attention to someone else. He is tending to the servant’s coldness in a human way.
This is a turning point in the story; Lear stops ranting about misfortune and how he has been wronged and instead attends to the needs of another person. His redemption begins.
Eventually the king is reunited with Cordelia—the one true daughter, who had been banished from the kingdom. He recognizes how he has wronged her and begs her forgiveness. But soon after reconciling their differences, Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner by the subversive factions. Surprisingly, this turn of events no longer produces rage in the old king. In fact, Lear seems to accept that life is a prison of sorts.
In the final scene, we learn that Lear has killed the slave who was hanging Cordelia. The old king enters the stage carrying Cordelia’s limp body in his arms. Is she dead or alive? Lear brings forth all the tests of the time to see if his beloved daughter might be revived. He places a mirror against her mouth to see if it will fog from a bit of breath. He puts a tiny feather under her nose to see if it might move with the slightest exhalation. Both tests fail.
Transformation of Consciousness
Some literary critics claim that the story of King Lear ends in utter despair and darkness, but the old king who holds Cordelia in the final scene is not the same man who at the beginning ruled by whim and fancy. He speaks to Cordelia, “You are a spirit, I know. When did you die? Do you see this? Look on her, look her lips, look there, look there!” Then Lear loses consciousness.
Does Cordelia live? Understood as a psychological symbol, yes, she is eternal. Cordelia represents the transformative power of “what is.” She is not grasping, manipulative, anxious, inflated, or depressed.
Does Lear live? That is the secret of the play. He certainly gains his enlightenment. Only one character, the loyal Kent, seems to understand the transformation that has occurred. When asked to share in the “rule of the realm,” Kent responds mysteriously: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. My master calls me; I must not say no.”