Loyalty and Betrayal

The desire for loyalty and the fear of betrayal run throughout King Lear. Lear’s demand that his daughters speak their love is a test and public exhibition of their loyalty. When she refuses, Lear sees Cordelia as betraying him. In response, he betrays himself and his love for her. Goneril betrays her father, her sister and her husband. Regan, too, betrays both father and sister. Lear goes mad because of his inability to understand their betrayals. Edmund betrays his brother and his father, but Gloucester thinks of him, at first, as a loyal son and of Edgar as treacherous. Despite how his father wronged him, Edgar remains loyal to his father, just as Cordelia and Kent remain loyal to Lear.

Madness

The idea of madness, real and feigned, in the persons of Lear and Edgar weaves through the play. Lear fears going mad and apparently does, although there is much sanity and even wisdom in his apparently mad utterances on the heath and with Gloucester in Dover. Edgar’s madness is assumed as part of his disguise, and his mad utterances are less expressive of the insights gained from extreme suffering than Lear’s. Edgar shows the cleansing effects of suffering in his same utterances.

Ideas of Nature

Edmund calls Nature his goddess. By ‘‘Nature’’ he means the impulses of life, independent of any higher power. He takes his own will to be a force of nature and he sees it as sufficient for governing his actions. Cordelia is set against him. She is governed by forces above Nature: duty and love. Speaking of her in act 4, scene 6, aGentleman says that she ‘‘redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to.’’ The two who have corrupted nature are Goneril and Regan, who in their cruelty to their father are deemed unnatural, if nature is defined as a moral force which binds children to their parents. According to Edmund’s idea of nature, Lear’s two daughters are completely natural, impelled and guided by no force but their own will. The other two that the word ‘‘twain’’ suggests are Adam and Eve, who in falling, corrupted nature. Cordelia, by her sacrifice, suggesting Jesus’ sacrifice, undoes their damage and heals nature just as Jesus redeems mankind in Christian thought. Although King Lear is set in pre-Christian times, Christian allusions would resonate with Shakespeare’s audience.

Seeing and Blindness

‘‘See better, Lear,’’ Kent cries out as Lear rages at him, ‘‘Out of my sight,’’ as Kent tries to prevent him from erring in the division of the kingdom. After he is blinded, Gloucester says he ‘‘stumbled when he saw.’’ Throughout King Lear Shakespeare sets vision and blindness against each other, extending the function of seeing beyond eyesight to mean perceiving truly and understanding correctly. Even Cordelia, in act 5, scene 3, confesses to a fault in vision when she says, ‘‘We are not the first / Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.’’

Sexual Revulsion

Sexuality is portrayed as a particularly grim and dangerous force in King Lear. Edmund the villain is a bastard, and his father, Gloucester, is portrayed in the first lines of the play as an unrepentant libertine. Goneril and Regan are portrayed as being sexually rapacious as well as power-hungry. Even in the first scene, as she is pledging her love to Lear, Regan introduces the idea of sexuality with an anatomically suggestive reference: ‘‘I profess / Myself an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense professes.’’ Both of them vie with each other for Edmund’s love, and in each case, it is an adulterous passion and a passion which leads

Goneril to poison Regan and then take her own life. In the storm, Lear cries out to the raging heavens, ‘‘Hide thee thou bloody hand, / Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue / That art incestuous.’’ Poor Tom, too, speaks of sexual vice. Lear’s most severe indictment of sexuality comes in act 4, scene 6, beginning at line 112 in his speech about sexual licence, which concludes with a hellish vision of female sexuality.

STYLE

Blank Verse

Most of King Lear is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is called blank verse. Pentameter means there are five feet in a line. A foot is composed of two syllables or beats. Iambic signifies the rhythm of speech. In an iambic foot the accent pattern is unaccented/ accented. The iambic pentameter line ‘‘With reservation of an hundred knights,’’ (act 1, scene 1, line 135) for example, is scanned like this, ‘‘with RE/serVA/tion OF/an HUN/dred KNIGHTS.’’

Spoken English usually falls into an iambic pattern.

Soliloquy

A soliloquy is a speech a character delivers when alone on stage. It is an address to the audience revealing the character’s inner thoughts and feelings. Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear contains several important soliloquies. An often-quoted one from act 1, scene 2, has Edmund proclaiming, ‘‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.’’

Double Plot

King Lear combines and integrates two separate plots—the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot. Until the end of act 3, the Lear plot predominates. At the close of act 3, the Gloucester plot becomes more prominent and begins to occupy more stage time than it had previously. As the play draws towards its end, both plots converge in the Edmund, Goneril, Regan triangle, and in Edmund’s ambition to rise as high as Lear and Edmund’s consequent need to have Lear and Cordelia killed.

Spectacle

Unlike classic Greek tragedy, in which violence is performed off-stage and only reported, tragedies in Elizabethan and Jacobean England presented violence as an on-stage spectacle. In King Lear, Shakespeare follows this practice with the on-stage crushing out of Gloucester’s eyes.

Historical context

Succession

Queen Elizabeth I of England died, unmarried and without an heir, on March 24, 1603. She had occupied the throne of England for forty-five years and had made no provision for an heir. After

Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son and Elizabeth’s closest relative, was chosen her successor—he became James I of England. Contention was avoided, although Philip of Spain believed that his daughter, Isabella, ought to become England’s queen. Lady Arbella Stuart, James’ cousin, as a direct descendent of Henry VII, might also have had a claim.

In France, the problem of succession had arisen, too, and taken a far more violent form than in England, with battles and the massacre of Protestants in August 1572. In 1589, Henri IV became king, but his ascension to the throne did not signal the end of strife. Nevertheless, Henri IV reigned until his death in 1610. It is likely that neither Shakespeare’s royal nor his popular audiences would miss the topicality of Lear’s desire to control the confusion and strife that had recently accompanied two significant monarchies at the moments of succession.