Concluding King Lear

The ending of King Lear was at one time completely changed for performance, and it is not difficult to determine why. While the play is a tragedy and deaths are to be expected, the gravity of the situation at hand in this play is just immensely sad. First of all, the number of deaths in the play is exceedingly large. Regan and Goneril end up poisoned, Gloucester, Edmund, Lear, and Cordelia all end up killed in different ways, and Cornwall dies from wounds inflicted upon him by a servant.  In some interpretations the fool dies as well, and that death in particular seems completely unnecessary and uncalled for. However, the aspect that makes this play truly hard-hitting when it comes to how depressing it is definitely the fact that Cordelia's death is supposed to be prevented, but isn't simply because the messenger doesn't get to her in time. 

When King Lear enters with his daughter's body and shouts "howl, howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones" the ending gets even more intense (p. 2565, 5.3.256). Both Lear's animalistic qualities and pure human aspects are coming together to grieve for this horrible loss that has been forced upon him, and we can see and feel how truly affected by this loss Lear is and as a reader we feel his pain. When Lear then dies shortly thereafter, it is almost something of a relief for him, and whenever death offers relief for anyone in any situation it is incredibly indicative of what sort of situation surrounds him or her.

Once all of the deaths have taken place, the conclusion of the play shows us Kent, Edgar, and Albany being the only characters left alive. They discuss how they must begin to rebuild their world and say that “the weight of this sad time [they] must obey” (p. 2567, 5.3.322).  What can be seen here is that even the three men who until this point (or various points which were all very recent in the text) were not prone to feel sympathy towards these dying characters can feel and are feeling the full impact of the emotion during this conclusion. The whole ending combined with the madness that occurs within the play as a whole merges to make for an incredibly emotional journey for the reader and the characters within the work.

A woman viewed NOT as a paycheck

As I was reading Act I of King Lear I was very interested in how the King of France and King of Burgundy would react to Cordelia’s disownment and banishment.  I was eager to see if both or either or neither of them would still want her as a wife without her promised inheritance.  Burgundy acted how I expected—he saw this as an unfit business deal and respectfully revoked his proposal.  The King of France, however, really surprised me when he not only still accepted her, but he admired her and loved her all the more after her disownment and banishment.  At 1.1.243 he adoringly proclaims, “’Tis strange that from their cold’st neglect/My love should kindle to inflamed respect.”  It is clear that he fell very hard and very fast for the rejected princess.

            Personally, I think that France is making a very wise decision as a leader of a country as well as a man seeking out a spouse.  He has just witnessed first hand how loyal, true, and virtuous Cordelia is.  She holds on to her values and morals even at the risk of losing her family, home, and inheritance.  She will not flatter or give in to her sisters’ phony adulation; she will only speak of the love that is and should be in a daughter’s heart for her father.   He also sees that she has accepted her disownment with grace, where a panicked and angry disposition would seem completely understandable and rational.  Unlike Burgundy who only views Cordelia as an expired paycheck, France sees the priceless value of a genuinely good woman.  He makes this clear at 1.1.240-241: “Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon./Be it lawful, I take up what’s cast away.”  As a King, it is very important to have a loyal and true queen by his side.   In my opinion, I believe France definitely got the best deal of any of the characters in Act 1.

            Since the beginning of this class, this is one of the first examples where a suitor chose a woman solely for her inner character.  In almost every other play we’ve read, the betrothing of a woman is simply a business deal.  Suitors choose a wife based on how much land and property she will come with.  We saw that in Taming of the Shrew with Baptista’s strategic and business-like negotiations with his daughters’ suitors.  More recently, I recall Henry V’s negotiation with the King of France for his daughter’s hand in marriage.  Henry only wanted the princess because of her inheritance and land.   It was very refreshing to see one of Shakespeare’s male characters who actually treasures a woman’s virtue and inner value—such a breath of fresh air!

Tell Me Lies

The first aspect of the play I noticed as I read the first act is the negative reception received from King Lear at being confronted with honesty.  The first instance in which this is demonstrated is when King Lear is partitioning his land to his three daughters.  He has each daughter express the immensity of her love for him, and makes a game out that can rightly be called “Who loves me most?”  When his two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter their father with such profound pronouncements of love, which we can tell are superficial in nature, he receives them well and marks their land inheritances on the map.  When Coredelia’s turn arrives the king expects her to try to surpass her elder sisters in her love for him as her father, but instead she states “I love your majesty / According to my bond [filial duty]; nor more nor less” (1.1.91-92).  He insists that she speak more lovingly to him, but she refuses to sweet-talk him and remains honest and sincere:          

                              Good my lord,

                              You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I

                              Return those duties back as they are right fit,

                              Obey you, love you, and most honor you.  (1.1.94-97)

She explains to her father that it seems questionable for her sisters to have husbands if they love him above all else, which hints at their insincerity.  Cordelia tells him that when she marries, half of her love will go to her husband, as it should, while the other half shall stay with him.  Her honesty is not received well, as he denies her any inheritance and disowns her as his daughter.  King Lear demonstrates here that flattery is what appeals to him.  This relates to his insistence on keeping his one hundred knights.  By having them around him, King Lear remains powerful and noble looking.  Superficial and shallow is the king, who cares very much about appearance and frivolous things.  He wants the title of king and the splendor that comes from being king, but he does not want to be burdened with the stress and woes of the position.  This truly reveals how phony he is, and how skewed his priorities are.

               We see another instance in which honesty and truthfulness are not acknowledged in a positive light when Kent stands up for the disowned Cordelia.  Kent, having served King Lear many years, truly honors him, but feels that he has stepped out of line in his reaction to Cordelia’s response (excuse the improper structureof inset quotation - certain lines did not fit well and needed to be moved down to maintain the clean "block-like" appearance, else they would be jutting out):

                              Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,

                              When power to flattery bows?  To plainness [plain speaking] 

                               honor’s bound,                                   

                              When majesty stoops to folly.  Reverse thy 

                              doom [revoke your sentence],

                              And, in thy best consideration, check [halt]

                              This hideous rashness.  (1.1.147-151)

Kent insists that Cordelia loves does not love King any less than his other two daughters, and that her words contain no insincerity within them.  Lear becomes infuriated with Kent’s questioning of his decision to disown Cordelia and his defending of her behavior.  The disgruntled king lays his hand on his sword, ready to attack Kent!  This seems pretty drastic to me, especially considering how much Kent has done for him.  He banishes Kent and threatens to have him killed if he sets foot within kingdom.  King Lear’s admonishment of Cordelia’s and Kent’s honesty is ridiculous.  It is as if King Lear is saying “Tell me lies” because those sweet words of falsehood provide him with a sense of security.

Now she’s gone forever

King Lear’s fall is an obvious one to point out. When we first meet Lear he is an aging yet still power-wielding monarch, and at the play’s conclusion we wave goodbye to an old man once king heading to kingdom come sans crown. And that’s just the tip of the peripatetic iceberg. Tied to every royal is the fate of a nation (which is why today’s Britons prefer their fate in the red-hot hands of William the Dashing and not in the pale hands of Charles the Bore). Despite his attempts at fostering otherwise, Lear’s nation has fallen into political madness due to the selfishness of the very people to whom Lear reasoned he should bequeath Britannia. Put together Fortune’s fun with man and country is relatively easy to pin point. But what concerns this blog post is not the question of Lear’s unfortunate fortune, but instead what I’m interested in is pin pointing Lear’s point of recognition and its implications. Now to this point, we point.

“A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! I might have saved her!” If the object of Lear’s vitriol were indeed singular and directed only at the Captain then at least his words would half-truth be -- the other half being the half he himself would contribute to the current plagued state of events. But Lear directs his condemnation at the tragedy’s least guilty and inarguably its most redemptive and still living characters (tear drop, Cordelia. Tear drop, lowly classed brave heart): the honorable Kent, the redeeming Edgar, and the judicious Albany (an ironic and funny anachronism, don’t cha think). Lear’s condemnation is of course woefully, or more to our meta-theatrical play, pitifully ignorant. Murderers? Traitors? He might have saved her? Puh-lease. About the only thing he saved was defeat from the jaws of victory (Oh! Two snaps and a crown in yo' face!)

Here Shakespeare leaves little room for audiences to expect that in the tragedy’s final moments Lear will explicitly recognize his culpability in Cordelia’s death. So what do we get instead? In the opening scene, Lear doesn’t recognize Cordelia’s honesty and the true simplicity of her love for him. Telling his daughter to refit her words to fit his fancy, Lear says “Nothing, will come of nothing, speak again” and when she does not modify her speech he banishes her from his sight, court, and royal fortunes. So I’m interested in interpreting Lear’s recognition as an implicit one. Perhaps the moment when, after he brings in his daughter’s dead body, he mistakenly thinks Cordelia might still be alive. Here, Lear can’t recognize Cordelia in life or death. He doesn’t know her beating heart. Lear does finally recognize his daughter fully, but unfortunately for him it’s too late: “Now she’s gone forever!”

Poor guy.

Cordelia's Senseless End

As I neared the end of King Lear, I couldn’t help but notice that this play has been without a doubt the most dramatic, bleak and horribly gruesome of Shakespeare’s works that I have read thus far. Beginning with the scene in which Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out and stomped on by Regan and Cornwall and ending with the death of nearly every major character, King Lear is a play that ends on quite a depressing note. Though we are given a small amount of retribution with Albany and Edgar living past the end and reassuming their titles, part of me feels as though a few of the events at the end were a bit unnecessarily harsh, particular Cordelia’s death.

At the end of Act Four, when Cordelia returns to the forefront with her easy forgiveness of her father’s banishment, I honestly thought she might survive to the end despite my knowledge of many of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I couldn’t think of a reason why she would need to die, or how her death would somehow rebalance the outcome; and this being my first exposure to Lear, I thought my prediction was decently sound. Shakespeare even makes an effort to reaffirm Cordelia’s legitimacy by contrasting her treatment of her delirious father with how Regan and Goneril had previously addressed him: “Will’t please your highness to walk?” With just a simple phrase, she shows her father the respect her siblings have been denying him all along, and she does this regardless of how her father completely disregarded her. As a character, she is entirely grounded, and despite her ordeal, her priorities remain intact.

Even the way in which Cordelia is killed seems senseless to me. Following the scene in Act Three, one would think that Shakespeare would have little issue in staging another death, instead, Cordelia’s death occurs completely off-screen, as Edmund had ordered her hanged and his messenger was unable to stop the execution in time. By killing off such an inherently innocent character, I would think Shakespeare would want her death to be dramatic and obvious. Thankfully, we are at least given the moment where Lear walks on stage with his daughter in his arms, completely heartbroken and desperate for a glass to see if she breathes. I think the moment that was by far the most frustrating to me occurs right before Lear’s not-so-shocking death, in which he thinks that his daughter might still be alive: “Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, look there, look there!” For a moment, I thought she would breathe and survive, but she doesn’t, and I’m left feeling that her death was completely in vain.

King Lear

After finishing King Lear I can honestly say that I didn’t expect the play to end the way that it did. Truthfully, as with many of Shakespeare’s plays, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I certainly didn’t expect so many deaths. I assumed earlier in the play that Lear would eventually die, especially because his sanity was obviously degrading throughout the play, but I didn’t expect him to simply drop dead from what can only be defined as shock.

I was also shocked that Cordelia was hanged; I had assumed that if one person were surely going to make it through the play, it would be Cordelia, because she was clearly one of the better characters of the play. When the deaths of Regan and Goneril were announced, however, I was neither shocked or upset and felt that they got what they deserved.

One of the things that bothered me during Act five was how quickly the battle was presented in 5.2. Obviously, Shakespeare didn’t want to spend much time on this and wanted to get to the end of the play, which is fine, but I felt it was almost comical how quickly it was portrayed. The directions have Edgar run off stage and then almost immediately run back on. I think a small aside from Gloucester would have worked well here and wouldn’t have made the battle seem so rushed.

Finally, I was also slightly confused as to who became the King at the end of the play. We never see anyone crowned and, unless I missed it, no one said that they would become King. All we know for sure is that Kent declines the position. Are we to assume that because Edgar doesn’t decline it, he has accepted the position? Personally, I’m a little surprised that Shakespeare didn’t include a crowning ceremony at the end of this play as he has done at the end of others, but I suppose that would’ve taken away from the tragic ending of the play.

All of a Sudden, I Love You

I love Shakespeare's tragedies. They're pretty good at setting up a finale that looks like everything will work out and then the ultimate blows are dealt and everyone is left crying. King Lear is probably the best example, with Goneril and Regan killing each other, Edmund being killed by his noble brother, and Lear and Cordelia being reunited. You want to believe that Cordelia will take car of her father and rule the land (and rule the land she does, in the original version of the legend. Shakespeare loves his unhappy endings, I suppose), but instead she is killed, leaving Lear to die of madness and a broken heart. This kind of reminds my of Othello, except Desdemona was already dead when Iago was (finally!) exposed.

What I love about the ending of Lear is what happens between Lear and Cordelia. Lear at this point is completely bonkers, but he is still able to recognize Cordelia for who she is: the pure, noble daughter. Or, does he? If the tearing of the clothes and the flower crown are any indication, Lear has just given up on sanity. Broken and destitute, he accepts the help from Cordelia and rests at France's camp. Is it just because she's a nice lady and looks like Cordelia? I think the text indicates that he does recognize her (stating "I think this lady to be my child Cordelia") but he still has issue with her ("I know you do not love me"). So, the first meeting indicates that Lear recognizes Cordelia, but his insanity keeps him from forgiving.

Jump to the end of the play: Lear and Cordelia are captured, prompting Lear to wish nothing more than to be with his daughter and "kneel down, and ask of thee [Cordelia] forgiveness." It seems that the insanity of war snaps Lear out of it, if only temporarily. After Cordelia is killed, Lear only sees the possibility of her still being alive. Kent tries to reveal himself to Lear, but Lear's babbling prompts Albany to state "He knows not what he says: and vain it is that we present us to him." I think that line is the key to the entire play. From the very beginning, it was completely vain to speak up to Lear, reason with Lear, bring Lear to different places, get Lear to recognize someone, and really get Lear to do anything. He threw his "love" around like he was throwing M&Ms, causing both Kent (or Caius) and Cordelia (in the final act) quite a bit of trouble. Cordelia, especially, is a good example of this insanity: after everything that happened in the play and Lear's unwillingness to forgive, all of a sudden, he loves Cordelia again. It's not because of everything Goneril and Regan did, it's because he thinks he recognizes her in his insane cloud. Only after Cordelia dies does Lear feel true sadness, and even then he is completely bat crazy.

I want to believe Lear knows as soon as he wakes up that Cordelia is there for him and loves him deeply. But, there is so much build up in the heath that I have to see the dramatic reunion as dramatic for Cordelia, and confusing for Lear. Death reveals all, and for Lear, Cordelia had to die so he could realize her purity. I suppose that's tragedy for ya.

-Sarah Bras

Cordelia and the Fool

I found it peculiar that the Cordelia disappears in Act I of the play, only to return in Act IV, while the Fool appears in Act II and III, and disappears once Cordelia returns. Simple coincidence? Maybe yes, maybe no.

When I first read Lear for English Lit. I, I was upset when the Fool disappeared in Act III because, for notable reasons, he was my favorite character. When I realized that the Fool and Cordelia were only in an act if the other was absent, I thought it was interesting so I researched it. I found that it is thought that during Shakespeare's time the actor who played Cordelia also played the Fool, so there's a more literal parallel. Also, the ending, when Lear says, "And my poor fool is hanged," (5.3, ln. 304) he is holding dead Cordelia in his arms; when the Fool departs from the play for good in Act 3.6, he says "And I'll go to bed at noon." (3.6, ln. 78). The Fool's line, metaphorically, could be saying that he'll take his life at noon, before the downfall, presumably, of King Lear. When Lear refers to Cordelia as a "fool", the footnote suggests that is relates to the Fool's disappearance in 3.6. I believe the Fool and Cordelia represent the faults of Lear throughout the play.

When the Fool leaves us in 3.6, he portrays a half-jokingly, resigned persona that deems Lear as almost hopeless. I see the Fool as another side of Cordelia, as the Fool delivers the more sarcastic, yet realistic lines to the King to remind him of his fault. When we see Lear next (without his Fool) he has gone completely mad. Without Cordelia or the Fool in his life, he has lost all hopelessness, and even though the Fool was constantly criticizing Lear when in his presence, it's almost as if King Lear had a dependency on the Fool, and when he left that's when his insanity ensued.

Also, being that both the Fool and Cordelia are the two characters who represent "truth", it could be said that their deaths add to the theme of hopelessness and despair that this tragedy projects. When they die, as does truth, and as the Fool's disappears, it seems to foreshadow to Lear that he is too late: by the time he realizes the truth, Cordelia is dead.