King Lear- Essay, Research Paper
King Lear-
In a writing of Shakespeare’s play “King Lear”, the main
character is King Lear who starts off as a respected and powerful
king. As the story progresses the king loses his power because of his
own stupidity and blindness. The tragedy of this play is shown through
the daughters of the king, the fool, and finally when Lear’s sanity is
tested. At the beginning of the play, King Lear is powerful and harsh.
He decides he doesn’t want to be king anymore, and so he asks his
daughters, Reagan, Goneril, and Cordelia to tell him how much they
love him. He does this so he may give them a dowry to be married with.
First, Goneril begins to tell her father how much she adores him and
would never disrespect him, this is a lie. Next, is the daughter
Reagan, she does the same as her sister and lies to the king saying
that she loves him with all of her heart. Finally, Cordelia tells her
father that she could not tell him how much she loves him, because she
had no words. The king was very upset with Cordelia and because of his
madness towards Cordelia thinking that she did not love him as much as
her other sisters, he divided the land in two and gave Reagan and
Goneril each half. Cordelia on the other hand received nothing as her
dowry and in turn no none would marry her except the King of France.
Giving the land to the two daughters was the first of Lear’s mistakes,
for the daughters did not love him as much as Cordelia did, but they
wished to have his riches. When Goneril and Reagan are in power
they try to make Lear appear to be incompetent. They refer to him as
“The Idle Old Man” in front of everyone and start to make even Lear
think less of himself. Although the two sisters do this they also
realize that Lear still holds a great deal of power in their areas, so
they decided something must be done about it. The “loving” daughters
command Lear to let go fifty of his one hundred servicemen, saying
that they will not pay for it and that it is unnecessary. Lear then
starts to worry that if Goneril isn’t happy then she in turn will make
him unhappy and he agrees to let them go. Next, the fool is
introduced. Shakespeare does this to show the deterioration of Lear
that has taken place since the beginning of the play. The Fool is his
name, however, he is a wise man. He is a tutor to Lear and tries to
slow him down so that he will not lose his mind. However, in the
process the fool makes subtle hints to Lear that he has made some bad
decisions. These hints do not help Lear, they just provoke more
thinking about what he might have done to himself by giving away his
kingdom. After Lear leaves Gonerils castle, the former king travels
to his other daughter, Reagan’s castle. When he arrives there he
discovers that Reagan and her husband have left. Little does he
know that they had found out form Goneril that he was coming and they
didn’t want for him to stay at their castle. He later travels to
Gloucester castle and learns there that Reagan and Goneril are not
fighting as they led him to believe. This makes Lear very upset, and
Reagan orders him to be kicked out of the castle. Outside of the
castle there is a very bad thunder storm, this makes Lear believe that
the elements have joined forces with his daughters to try and defeat
him. He begins to yell at the storm in a fit a of anger. From this
scene it is quite apparent that Lear had nearly lost his mind. In
conclusion, the reader is shown how Lear went from being a respected
and powerful king to a regular man who seems to have lost all of his
family. The two people that he trusted most were the same people, that
in the end were the cause of his down fall. And the people he did
not trust were the ones who truly loved him and tried to protect Lear
but, Lear would not believe that he needed protection from his own
daughters. This was not true and at the end of the play the former
king had died.
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