Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed that the external manifestation of one’s feeling, values and ideas had to meet the criteria of a specific ritual and they did not believe that simple action can define a person’s attitude without the ritual being performed. Moreover, it was believed that the higher up a person would be on the social ladder, the higher his/her chances were to diplay more intricate rituals of love, respect, virtue, in the nation and in the family. In the play ” King Lear”, Shakespeare shows that appearances and words are ever deceiving and are not clear indications of the soul or the mind. Even though Gonerile and Regan, his daughters, are of noble birth, they hardly show noble souls. Therefore, the two daughters’ ingratitude towards their parents are opposed to Cordelia’s, the youngest daughter, who respects her father, especially when he no longer had the power of a king.
The play ” King Lear” begins with such a ritual at the request of Lear, who asks his daughters to show, through their words and demeanour, who loves him the most. ” Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (1.1.49), says Lear, inviting his daughters to flatter him. After Goneril flatters Lear with the pretentious claim that she loves him more dearly than her eyesight and liberty. Regan tries to outdo her sister, testifying that Goneril’s statement does not do full justice to her own profound affection for her beloved father. Exaggerating, Regan vows that her father’s love is her greatest source of happiness, trying to single herself out in this battle of false proclamations and exaggerated claims.
From the beginning, we have a competiton between the two elder sisters for their father’s attention. But it is not a competition for his love. Their aim is to receive a larger part of the inheritance and the power that comes with it. Although their goals are clear from the start, Lear fails to take notice because this is the way he believes that true, natural love that a child has for her father can be expressed. Goneril and Regan give the king what he requests: falsehood, appearance, flattery.
Refusing to indulge in the chant of her sisters, Cordelia, the youngest daughter, professes her love with simple honesty and natural eloquence: ” …I love your majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less” ( 1.1.81-82). ” Bond” means filial duty, so Cordelia understands what the children’s duties to their father are. Unsatisfied with the type of answer he receives, Lear encourages Cordelia to adopt the same style of flattering speech her sisters have displayed. Still, Codelia refuses the invitation to flattery. Instead, she thanks her father for the gift of life, for the blessings of an education and for his lifelong care. She is disturbed by her sisters’ pretence that they love their father even more than their husbands. she makes an effort to open Lear’s eyes to her older sisters’ deception, but fails. As a result, Cordelia is banished and the kingdom is split between Goneril and Regan.
In this opening scene, Shakespeare identifies the source of evil and the cause of tragedy as the failure to see natural differences and hierarchical distinctions. In ” King Lear: The Attack on Fatherhood and the Destruction of Hierarchy, „Mitchell Kalpakgian notices the following: Lear is confusing appearance with reality, failing to distinguish between lies and truth, between flattery and praise, between words and deeds. Goneril and Regan are obliterating the difference between the love for a parent and the love for a husband and obscuring the distinction between humouring a crotchety king and honouring an aged father. ( Kalpakgian 164)
What Kalpakgian notices is actually the state of affairs in Shakespeare’s apparently neatly, hierarchically organized world. The king, the highest authority in the land, has fallen into a trap of his own making. The universe in which he thinks and acts was built on flattery, artifice, falsehood, the theatricality of the absolutist monarchy. Lear has become so immersed into his artificial universe that he has become unable to distinguish between its layers, between the artifice of representation of power, and the natural relationship that exist in a family, which must not be permeated by the artifice of the outside world.
Moreover, Lear misinterprets what Cordelia says. When she is saying she loves him according to her bond, no more, no less, Lear thinks Cordelia is talking from a hierarchical point of view, him being the master of the household, when in fact she is talking about the natural bond between parents and children, a bond which cannot be properly expressed through words. she is also referring to her sisters’ falsehood, who claim that they love their father more than each of the sisters, when, in fact, a love between father and one child cannot be measured against the love that the other child has for his/her father. When referring to this natural bond, Cordelia is also assuring her father that this will always be the criteria up against her relationship with him will be measured, no matter his or her future social position, She will always obey him, love him and honour him as her father ( which in Shakespeare’s times also implied as her ruler); she will always keep this rapport of power established by the natural bond that exists between them, something that Goneril and Regan are not planning on doing, as Lear will find out soon.
After Lear divides his estate and he resigns his kinship, he soon notices a lack of respect and a loss of honour, an absence of affection from his two daughters and a sense of neglect. Goneril’s servant Oswald addresses the former king as ” My lady’s father ” (1.4.68) demeaning him to be inferior subject, placing him in a hierarchical structure in which the ruler is Goneril now, not Lear. After being rejected by his second daughter as well, Lear tries to explain why he needs his symbols of authority. He believes the beautiful clothing, the formal rituals, the symbols of office and the tokens of respect – those marks that distinguish individuals and acknowledge the natural hierarchical differences among men – are necessary to him still, otherwise, he would be no different from animals.
Once Goneril and Regan decide to leave their father out in the storm, they stop being his daughters. Their sole purpose now is to conquer the power, the title their father used to have, for themselves. Supreme authority can be blinding and this mirage turns the two sisters one against the other.
With all their desires and aspirations to mimic the perfection of the Cosmos and that of the divine creation, humans will always be driven by earthly impulses. The faultlessness of the divine order of the cosmos can only be mimed in the human society. Artifice is an absolute necessity in this game of imitation, but the artifice loses its defining characteristic, as Lear ends up doing when he starts believing that the theatricality of monarchy is the natural order that must govern the relationship between memebers of the family. The demolition of the simulacrum – in King Lear’s case, the ravaging storm drives Lear insane – is inevitable and must take place in order for the humans to be able to rebuild reality on more sincere and truthful grounds.
Autor: prof. Bogdan Georgiana
Sursă imagine: https://www.schoolbooksdirect.ie/product/king-lear-wordsworth-classic/
WORKS CITED
References to Shakespeare’ s King Lear are from the Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt ( 1997).
Greenblatt, Stephen. ” General Introduction. ” The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 1-76.
Kalpakgian, Mitchell. ” King Lear: The Attack on Fatherhood and the Destruction of Hierarchy. ” Catholic Social Science Review, vol.3, 1998, pp. 163-172.
