To become a great and powerful ruler, the responsibility and ability to be able to understand individuals’ emotions are of the utmost importance. Without this capability, disaster is inevitable. In William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the character of Lear begins the play as a supremely powerful being; having full and complete rule over his kingdom. However, as the plot progresses, Lear finds himself deprived of this power that he desperately tries to hold on to. As a result of this, he begins to realize his skewed judgement and finds himself developing into an individual with a high sense of morality. He opens the play with an unusual and immoral ‘love contest’, revealing his inability to quantify love and hunger to retain power. In the third act, Lear begins to shift his perspective and realize his mistakes and loss of power. Finally, Cordelia’s hanging in the final act and scene is the culmination of these shifting ideas: morality reaches its peak while power falls to nothing.
In the events that take place during the first scene of the first act of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear is represented as an all-powerful authoritarian figure with no regard for the emotional or physical well-being of those around him. As the complete ruler of the country of Britain, he is fully capable of doing whatever he pleases and basing these actions on his emotions:
Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity, and property of blood, / And as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom / Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved / As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.113-120)
In this specific scenario, Lear has made the decision to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. However, the method in which he conducts this is a blatant power trip. Lear proclaims that “Which of you shall we say doth love us most / That we our largest bounty may extend” (1.1.50-51), explaining that whichever of his daughters convinces him that they love him the most, will get the largest share of land. After his previous ‘favourite’ daughter; Cordelia, refuses to participate in his ‘contest’, Lear becomes filled with anger: disowning and denouncing the actions of Cordelia. He states that she is now “a stranger”, using a metaphor to demonstrate that; even though Cordelia had been his most beloved daughter and he had planned to distribute the largest part of the kingdom to her, her lack of loving words combined with his absence of empathy have led him to treat Cordelia thusly in a very short period of time. The retention of power and motive behind these series of events are expertly described in John J. McLaughlin’s The Dynamics of Power in King Lear: An Adlerian Interpretation. In the piece published in the revered Oxford University Press’ Shakespeare Quarterly, McLaughlin uses the strange division method of the kingdom as a representation of Lear’s quest to retain his high-power status at any cost, including the well-being of his daughter:
It is power that motivates the strange opening action: an aged king directs a public ceremony in which he voluntarily abdicates his kingdoms to his daughters. No understanding of the scene is possible without the realization that Lear has no intention of stripping himself of power. Quite the contrary, his intent is to retain power at any cost. He is willing to give up political power, which no longer means anything to him, only because he thinks that doing so will enable him to consolidate the personal powers he fears are slipping away with advancing years. Hence the seemingly irrational love contest he contrives for his daughters, as well as the subsequent rage when Cordelia refuses to compete in the contest. (McLaughlin, 38)
However, it might be interpreted that Lear is giving up his kingdom to his offspring as a proponent of his high morality. After all, Lear claims that one of the reasons for dividing his kingdom up is to avoid any conflict after his death. While this may be true, it is quite difficult to trust Lear’s intentions: especially considering the following ‘love contest’.
As the play continues to progress and the character of Lear proceeds in his development, a stronger sense of morality is formed while his previous abundance of power begins to decrease. In the fourth scene of the third act; Lear, his fool and a disguised Kent and Edgar all reside in a quaint hovel to have shelter from a tempest that rages outside. Edgar; who is putting on the facade of being insane to disguise his identity as the son of Gloucester, begins to incessantly ramble nonsense. Lear, feeling sympathetic, states that:
Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters. Is it the fashion that discarded fathers / Should have thus little mercy on their flesh? / Judicious punishment! ‘Twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters. (3.4.65-70)
Not only is this statement in concern for the assumed insanity of Edgar, but it also reveals how Lear is now beginning to realize his fatal flaw or hamartia: his skewed idea of love. Had he based his judgement and land division on his intuition and previous feeling, Cordelia would have inherited the most out of the daughters: possibly preventing the conflicts that take place throughout the play. Lear also dignifies the notion of his declining power, regarding himself and Edgar as ‘discarded fathers’. He understands the situation he is now in; a disrespected king falling out of power, neglected by the very daughters he bestowed his power to. Moreover, Lear uses an opinionated sentence: “Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but unkind daughters” (3.4.65-66). Even though he believes Edgar’s insanity could not have been the result of cruel daughters such as Goneril or Regan, Lear’s rising morality still ends up with him blaming himself for the mistreatment he faced. Throughout the fourth act, the stage direction of ‘Storm still’ is used to remind the reader / audience of the presence of the tempest that rages on outside the hovel. This storm serves as a representation of the struggles of Lear and the clash of his emotions: the hunger for fleeting power battling with his slowly surfacing morality. Building off of these ideas of the storm and their implications, E. Catherine Dunn’s The Storm in King Lear shares valuable insights as to the rise of Lear’s morality. In another in-depth essay published by the aforementioned Oxford University Press’ Shakespeare Quarterly, E. Catherine Dunn points out Lear’s shifting perspective in the extract:
He is obsessed with his daughters’ ingratitude, but he realized that it was he who fathered the ungrateful Goneril and Regan. “ ‘Twas this flesh begot/ Those pelican daughters,” as he says later. In the first imprecation he invites the lightning to singe his own white head, the lightning which he had earlier asked to dart its blinding flames into Goneril’s eyes. (Dunn, 331)
Dunn clearly shares the same opinion that this scenario is one that can be used to demonstrate Lear’s path to a higher moral sense. In addition to the earlier example of Lear blaming Goneril and Regan’s actions on his lousy upbringing of them, he also reveals that he has switched from wishing lightning would strike his daughter to asking to be smitten himself. Nevertheless, one might believe that no father should even mention their children in the manner that Lear does. Lear constantly berates them, calling them vulgar names as he begins to understand their true intentions.
The final act and scene of King Lear bring Lear's character development to a close: his morality is spotlighted at its highest point and his power falls into the eternal abyss of his untimely demise. Finding himself on the losing end of a valiant battle that was fought alongside his formerly disowned daughter, Lear suffers the ultimate consequence of the hanging of Cordelia:
And my poor fool is hanged.‒‒No, no, no life? / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never.‒‒ / Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir. / Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there. O, O, O, O. (dies) (5.3.313-319)
Never before has this extent of desperate compassion been shown in Lear’s character. With the loss of his daughter, who; through his anagnorisis, he had sincerely begged for forgiveness and recently reconciled with, he finally releases his moral culmination. Lear’s peripeteia comes in the repetition of the phrase “Never, never, never, never, never.‒‒” (5.3.316), firmly imprinting the bleak reality of the situation not only into his own mind, but the audience’s as well. He comprehends that his most loving and compassionate daughter will never return to his arms, instilling a harsh wave to guilt upon him. Furthermore, his death with the stage direction ‘(dies)’ is his ultimate loss of power. Not only does this symbolize the end of the play, but the end of Lear’s influence as well. All three of his daughters are gone; he has no blood-related heir to carry on his legacy and rule his once-kingdom. Supplementing these points, Edward W. Tayler’s Negation in King Lear utilizes the repetition of the words ‘never’ and ‘no’ throughout the play as a means of shaping the plot of the play. The late Edward W. Tayler, having been a professor at the esteemed Columbia University, superbly summarizes Lear’s moral journey and recounts how his status as a king slowly slipped away from him:
At first Lear knows neither himself nor his daughters; the evil characters, unrecognized by the King and Gloucester for what they are, compel the good to say “nothing” (Cordelia), to be “nothing” (Edgar I nothing am), or “not to be known” (Kent). Lear will come to know himself first as unaccommodated man on the heath, and later as a “very foolish fond old man.” Through negation Lear will fumble his way toward anagnorisis, through no-ing he will move toward the knowing of Gloucester (“I know thee well enough”) and of Cordelia and Kent: “Methinks I should know you, and know this man.” As an unaccommodated man he comes to “recognize” in plain words plainly spoken--words far removed from the kingly magniloquence that marks the opening of the play. (Tayler, 18)
Tayler ensures to point out that, at the end of the play, Lear now ‘knows’ the characters for what they actually are and based on their true intentions. He ‘knows’ Cordelia and Gloucester, ultimately coming to understand that they are the individuals who support him. In addition, Tayler touches on the choice of words in Lear’s dialogue: a drastic shift from the kingly vocabulary heard in the first act of the play. Even so, this may be interpreted as less of a moral spotlight and more of Lear’s final desperate attempt for power. He does not want to accept the fact that all of his daughters have perished, as he now has no means of retaining any power himself.
Had King Lear understood the intentions and emotions of the characters within the play, he would have been able to retain his power. Nevertheless, his opening distorted sense of morality led to him losing all of his power and to his untimely demise. This transformation of Lear’s character forced him to see the flaws in his actions, bringing his improved moral capabilities into focus. He ends up paying the ultimate price for his actions, losing the daughter whom he most adored and who treated him best, forever. William Shakespeare utilizes this relation between King Lear’s power and morality as the driving idea for the entirety of the play: cementing the notion that, without morality, power can be a devastating weapon of self-destruction.
Works Cited
Secondary Works
Dunn, E. Catherine. “The Storm in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4,
1952, pp. 329–33. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2866694. Accessed 2 Jun. 2022.
McLaughlin, John J. “The Dynamics of Power in King Lear: An Adlerian Interpretation.”
Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 1, 1978, pp. 37–43. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869167. Accessed 1 Jun. 2022.
TAYLER, EDWARD W. “‘King Lear’ and Negation.” English Literary Renaissance, vol.
20, no. 1, 1990, pp. 17–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43447291. Accessed 2 Jun. 2022.
Primary Works
Shakespeare, William. King Lear (No Fear Shakespeare). Translated by SparkNotes,
SparkNotes, 2014.
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