Ring Bearer

For this post I want to talk about an underlying motif that I picked up on; namely, the Ring in all its forms and iterations. If you replace K with R and L with B (and add an “er” at the end), like Frodo, King Lear becomes a Ring Bearer. In the beginning, he cuts his ring (crown) in half and finds that like a split egg after the meat’s been eaten or a Zero (whose first letter “zed” is considered superfluous) or a “shealed peascod,” Lear is left with nOthing (1.4.174). This tragic sense of loss also resonates with the repetition of the exclamatory O, as in “O heavens!” or “World, World, O World,” which recalls the celestial and earthly spheres that spin the characters’ Wheel of Fortune. By the end of act IV Lear’s “wheel runs down a hill” and transmutes into a wheel of fire (2.4.67, 4.7.47). If you transmute his wheels into eyes and fire into blood you have the fate of Gloucester, who’s son Edgar shape-shifts into a fiend whose “eyes were two full moons” (4.6.70). It’s interesting that this fiend (who’s really Edgar himself) is associated with the moon, because in the magical tradition the moon is associated with the influences of our past, and as we know, Gloucester is now suffering, in a karmically fit way, for his earlier figurative blindness and the subsequent demonization of Edgar. Both Lear and Gloucester end up with a fiery wheel and bloody eyes (respectively) partly because, as the Fool say, “He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf” (3.6.16). In other words, madness arises out of an inability to see the true nature of the world. That doesn’t mean we should automatically tend toward adverse criticism--then you might end up like Edmund--but rather we need attentiveness, patience, and thoughtful deliberation to see through the trappings of the world. Which brings me to another important piece of the Fool’s wisdom: “The cod-piece that will house/Before the head has any,/The head and he shall louse;/So beggars marry many./The man that makes his toe/What he his heart should make/Shall of a corn cry woe,/And turn his sleep to wake” (3.2.25). Here the Fool outlines the essential hierarchy of human nature. The material and sexual needs of a human being are aspects of his/her lower nature while the faculties of thought and love are of a higher nature. The Fool’s wisdom speaks to the Shakespearean theme of “seeming” versus “being”: the tragedy of the play arises out of mistaking seeming for being and this whirlpool of a theme turns around the Ring motif in all its manifestations.