King Lear and His Relationships with His Daughters - Research Paper Example

?King Lear and His Relationships with His Daughters King Lear is a tragedy by Shakespeare that is considered to be one of the greatest masterpieces of his. The main character gets mad after being deprived of his estate by the two of his three daughters which have succeeded to gain the father’s throne due to the flattery though bringing rather tragic consequences for all. The tragedy is based upon the legend of Leir of Britain, a Celtic pre-Roman mythological king. Written between 1603 and 1606 the play was later revised. The earlier version, The True Chronicle of the history of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters, was published in two years later, in 1608. A later version, The Tragedy of King Lear was included in the 1623 First Folio. As a rule, the present-day editors conflate the two; however some maintain that each version possesses its individual integrity that ought to be preserved. After the Restoration, the play used to be revised to have a happy end for the audiences who hated the plays depressing and dark tone, yet since the nineteenth century William Shakespeare’s original version has been esteemed one of his most outstanding achievements. The tragedy is especially noted for its observations upon the nature of human kinship and sufferings. Elderly King Lear wishes to retire from his throne. He makes a decision to divide his kingdom among the three daughters of his. Moreover he offers the largest portion to the one who is the favorite one. Regan and Goneri flatter the father claiming that they love him more than anything else in this world and their speeches please him much. Cordelia has nothing to compare her love to. Furthermore she has no words to express it as eloquently as her sisters do. She speaks frankly, honestly though bluntly, so that is her manner to speak that eventually infuriates Lear. Being infuriated he disinherits Cordelia and divides his kingdom between Goneril and Regan. Earl Kent objects to such an unfair treatment. Lear gets still more enraged by the protests of Kent, so he banishes the Earl from the kingdom. The Duke of Burgundy abandons his suit having learnt that his fiancee has just been disinherited, though the King of France is so impressed by Cordelia’s honesty that marries her as she is. The King announces he is going to live alternately with Regan and Goneri and their husbands, the Duke of Cornwall and the Duke of Albany respectively. The King reserves to himself as a suite of a hundred knights to be supplied by his daughters. Egan and Goneril speak tete-a-tete and agree that Lear is foolish and old. Edmund resents his status and plots to restore his legitimate elder brother Edgar. He deceives Gloucester, his father with forged letter and thus makes him think that Edgar plots to usurp the realm. Kent comes back from exile disguised as Caius, so King Lear hires him as his servant. Lear finds out that Goneril has power now. Moreover she does not respect him any more. She demands that he behave himself better and eventually reduces the number of her father’s suite. Infuriated, Lear leaves for Regan’s home. The Fool jeers at his master’s misfortune. Edmund simulates an attack by Edgar so Gloucester absolutely taken in. Thereupon he disinherits Edgar and proclaims the latter outlaw. Then Kent meets Oswald at the home of Gloucester, quarrels with the former. As a result Reagan and Cornwall have him put in stocks. When Lear arrives, he protests yet Regan takes the same course as Goneril. This infuriates the King yet he finds himself impotent to do anything. Eventually Lear indulges his rage. He goes out into the storm to yell at his dishonest daughters, attended by the jeering fool. Then Kent follows to protect Lear. Gloucester argues against the King’s maltreatment. Wandering through the field after the storm, King Lear meets Edgar disguised as Tom O’Bedlam, who is mad. Edgar babbles foolishly while the King denounces the daughters of his. Gloucester leads them all to the shelter. Then Gloucester is betrayed by Edmund to Goneril, Regan and Cornwall. He shows his letter from his father to the French king and asks the latter for help. In fact French troops have already landed in Britain. After Gloucester is arrested Cornwall puts his eyes out. While he is doing so a servant is infuriated by what he had to witness so he attacks Cornwall and kills him. Then Regan kills the servant, and tells Gloucester that he has been betrayed by Edmund. She turns him out and makes him wandering the field either. Edgar in his fool’s guise as Tom meets blind Gloucester at the field. Gloucester asks Tom to lead him to some cliff so that he could jump to die. Goneril meets Edmund and finds out that he is more attractive than Albany, her husband is. The letter is regarded by her as a coward. Mutilation of Gloucester and the sisters’ treatment of the King repulse him, so he denounces Goneril. Kent leads the King to the French troops’ lines and finds Cordelia there. King Lear is half-insane and dramatically embarrasses by his previous follies. Albany leads British troops to meet the French. Regan is also attracted to Edmund and the sisters are getting jealous of one another. Goneril sends her letters to Edmund with Oswald and tell him to kill Gloucester in case he meet him. Edgar pretends to bring Gloucester to the cliff. He changes his voice and tells Gloucester that he has survived a tremendous fall. They meet the King who has already gotten completely mad. Lear yells that the entire world is spoilt and runs away (Taylor 234). Although Oswald is trying to slay Gloucester the latter is killed by Edgar. Edgar finds a letter from Goneril in Oswald’s pocket. Goneril suggests in a letter that Albany should be killed. Cordelia and Kent take charge of the King, whose insanity mainly passes. Albany, Edmund, Goneril and Regan meet with enemy forces. Albany says that they should fight the French troops yet should not do any harm to Cordelia or Lear. The sisters lust for Edmund though he has already promised both. He ponders over the dilemma and plots to kill Lear, Cordelia and Albany. Edgar offers Goneril a letter to Albany. The army meets the enemy in a battle. The French are defeated by the British and Cordelia and Lear are eventually captured. They are sent of by Edmund with the secret order to for being executed. Having gained victory the British leaders meet, and Regan now says that she is going to marry Edmund. Nevertheless Albany exposes Goneril’s and Edmund’s intrigues and calls Edmund a traitor. Goneril poisons Regan so she dies. Albany is defied by Edmund who calls for divine justice by combat. Edgar agrees to fight Edmund and maims him fatally in a duel. When Albany gives Goneril her letter she flees in rage and shame. After Edgar reveals himself Gloucester dies being overwhelmed by joy ands shock of such a revelation. Having stabbed herself offstage, Goneril confesses to poisoning her sister. Edmund dies and admits to giving order to kill the King and Cordelia, yet it is too late. Although Lear has already slain the killer, Cordelia is already dead. The King carries hid dead daughter’s corpse in his arms onstage. He recognizes Kent. Although urged by Albany to resume the power Lear is very much deep in grief that. The King collapsed and after all dies. Albany proposes to divide power between Edgar and Kent, yet the power is inherited by either Albany or Edgar, depending on the version of the play (Halliday 256-60). Socio-historical aspects of King Lear’s relationships with his daughters are studied by John F. Dandy in his work Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature – A Study of King Lear (1949). The words “nature”, “unnatural” and “natural” occur some forty times in the tragedy. In times of Shakespeare there was a debate over the question what the Nature was really like. This debate really pervades the tragedy and is expressed symbolically in the King’s changing attitude toward Thunder. Dandy maintains that the King dramatizes the current meaning of “Nature”. The tragedy contains two contradicting views of Nature. Those of Lear’s party made up of Lear himself, Albany, Gloucester and Kent) exemplified the philosophy of Hooker and Bacon while Edmund’s party made up of Edmund, Goneril, Cornwall and Regan similar to the views that Hobbes formulated afterwards. Furthermore King Lear contains another two views of Reason expressed in Edmund’s and Gloucester’s speeches on astrology. Edmund’s rationality is the view with which the present-day audience is likely to identify itself. Yet Edmund party’s rationalism is so outward that it grows into insanity. Such madness-in-reason is set against King Lear’s “reason in madness” as well as against the wisdom-in-folly of the Fool. Such a betrayal of reason is behind the play’s further emphasis on feeling. The two reasons and two Natures involve the concepts of the two societies. Since no actual mother appears throughout the narration, Coppelia Kahn offers a psychoanalytic explanation of Lear’s relationships with his daughters. Kahn argues that aging king Lear regresses into infantilism, so now he needs to be loved by a caring woman. She characterizes Lear as a child that needs to be mothered yet without any real mother. So he wishes his daughters could substitute his mother for him. The old man’s contest of love serves him as his binding agreement. His daughters are supposed to get their inheritance providing they take care of him, especially Cordelia whose nursery he would depend upon. Her unwillingness to love him more than she loves her husband is often viewed as a resistance from incest, yet Kahn inserts the image of a mother who rejects. As we can see the parent-child relationships have been reversed sp Lear’s insanity is essentially a rage of deprived of maternal care child. Even when Cordelia and Lear are caught together, this insanity persists as the king envisions a nursery in the jail where Cordelia’s only reason for existence is he. Nevertheless it is Cordelia’s death that eventually ends his fantasies of a daughter-mother, as the tragedy ends with male characters left only (Kahn pp. 600-604) . According to Freud Cordelia symbolizes nothing else but the death. Therefore, when the tragedy begins with King Lear rejecting the daughter, it could be interpreted as him rejecting death; Lear is unwilling to admit him being supposed to die after all. The tragedy’s poignant final scene wherein the King carries the body of his beloved daughter Cordelia was very significant from Freudian point of view. In that scene she makes her father realizing his finitude or a Freud explained it, she causes him to make acquaintances with inevitability of dying. It is logical to conclude that Shakespeare had special intentions with the death of Cordelia, as he was the only author to have her killed (an anonymous writer “allows her to live further happily so in Holinshed’s version she restores the farther and inherits his legacy. Another psychologist, Rachel E.Goldsmith and others suggest that the King’s temporary amnesia is consistent with his psychological amnesia. Elizabethan England was an extremely hierarchical country, demanding that absolute respect and deference ought to be paid not only to the powerful and rich yet also to the elderly and the parents. The True Chronicle of the history of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters shows how vulnerable noblemen and parents are to the treachery perpetrated unprincipled children and thus how frail the fabric of that time English society in fact was (Kermode 321). Previous century saw a number of various and abundant readings of the tragedy emerge as a result of the tumultuous social changes of the time. The family drama reading has long become prevalent in the twentieth century. This tragedy could be read as being about the dynamics in the relationships between parents and their children. Many societies tried to interpret by many cultures. Communist Soviet Union emphasized the suffering of the ordinary people and the oppressive power of the monarch. Works Cited Halliday, F A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964 Kahn, C. Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (review) Shakespeare Quarterly - Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2002, pp. 600-604 Kermode, F. King Lear, The Riverside Shakespeare Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974 Taylor, G. Warren, M, eds. The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1983 Read More