King+Lear+Character

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Lears’s decision-making and its consequences.**__

Decision-making is a key factor in tragedy, especially classical and Shakespearean tragedy, because the dramatic focus is usually on the king. Lear is irascible in both passages and the intemperance makes his decision-making impulsive and peremptory. The consequences of a king’s decisions will have more wide-ranging consequences than the decisions of an ordinary person: personal, familial, national, and international consequences. Lear’s decision-making is initially linked to his desire to surrender the throne to ‘younger strengths’, but he botches the hand-over of power, and therefore forces Cordelia and Kent, in 1, i, into the difficult position of playing along with his game or intervening with words of truth.

Lear, in the first passage, is refusing to have his sovereignty challenged and sees Kent’s intervention as treasonous and therefore he has to banish him - at least the banishment is one step less harsh than Cornwall and Regan’s dealing with Gloucester. The consequence of Lear’s impulsive decision is firstly personal. He has to go through the humiliation of his daughters’ haughty and stony indifference, and the second passage shows the awakening of his recognition of rejection by his daughters. Interestingly, in the second passage he foreshadows his fate - he will reside with animals/birds (ie nature); eventually, he ends in the French camp. The familial conflicts are initially resolved into two groups: Goneril/Regan/Albany/Cornwall in one camp, Lear and Cordelia/France in the other. The first division splits again though. Cornwall and Albany fall out, Goneril and Albany fall out, as do Goneril and Regan. Eventually, the consequence of his decision becomes national, for effectively the power vacuum after his abdication initiates a civil war. The familial conflicts lead to national consequences. Shared power is clearly an illusion. We hear early of the conflict between Albany and Cornwall, and with Cornwall’s death Goneril and Regan both want to marry Edmund, with Goneril plotting Albany’s death with the intention of making Edmund king.

The international context is established with Cordelia’s attack on England with a French army. Dover becomes the focal point for the last two acts. Having heard of her father’s plight through spies, she is determined to rescue her father and save the kingdom from her sisters. Her nobility is not rewarded. England wins the war under the command of Edmund, but his order to execute Cordelia is revoked too late to save her. The second passage continues the dramatisation of Lear’s impulsiveness. One of the ironies of the decisions Lear makes in the two passages – to banish Cordelia/Kent, and not to ‘disquantity his train’ and therefore live outside is that he goes through a purging process. As one of the consequences of Lear’s decision-making, there is scope here to discuss the irony of his gaining insight through suffering. His enlightenment means he sees the plight of the poor (which he had not noticed when he was king). He starts to see how foolish he has been in the ‘reason in madness’ sequence, and because he recognises his own foolishness (through the fool’s prompting, initially) he is ready to reconcile with Cordelia. The consequences therefore are tragic but also redemptive.

Passage 1  The passage occurs after Kent has intervened and attempted to persuade Lear to reverse his decision to banish Cordelia. Essentially, Lear is accusing Kent of treason, and that accusation of treason is followed by peremptory banishment. The imperatives in the passage exemplify the facility of the king with decisive decision-making, an important monarchical skill. However, his decisiveness is an example of tragic irony, for that strength is also his weakness, especially in the context of a cantankerous old age. Acting so quickly in dealing with a major problem rids him and the kingdom of an infidel (as he perceives it), but its two-fold rashness (he banishes Cordelia as well) means he is ridding himself of the wrong people (Kent, Cordelia) and playing into the hands of his egregious family. The oath ‘By Jupiter’ is interesting as it reveals the time period to be pre-Christian. Jupiter in Roman mythology is the god that enforces the incontrovertible dictates of the Fates. The pagan oath allows the reader to see the tyrannical connection between the monarch and the king of the gods. However, Kent shows he is resilient in the face of the king’s adamantine will. He lauds her virtue and hopes she will be protected in a world that is about to be turned upside down – his perspicacity is evident in his concern for Cordelia.

Passage 2  This passage occurs after Lear gets no purchase with Regan over the knights and she suggests he return to Goneril. After handing over the kingdom to his older daughters and their spouses, he has been staying at Goneril’s, but there he was rudely treated. Goneril trumped up charges against his supposedly rowdy knights. In the second passage his decision-making is as impulsive as the decisions to expel Cordelia and Kent. He dismisses Regan’s suggestion, thereby making himself homeless, and rather prophetically announces that he would rather live with the wolf and the owl or the king of France. He foreshadows here his own demise, his debasement, the fall from grace and exposure to the elements as the play’s action takes its tragic trajectory.

__A tragic flaw__  The concept of tragic flaw is first discussed in Aristotle’s //Poetics // . In Aristotle’s paradigm, a noble hero, marred by a tragic flaw or error, comes to a point of recognition of that error and thereby journeys from ignorance to knowledge and experiences a reversal of fortune. The flaw, the recognition and reversal all contribute to the pity and fear experienced by the audience (pity for the hero and fear the same tragic trajectory could happen to them). Purged of pity and fear the audience is then said to have experienced a catharsis of the emotions and therefore be more ready to deal with tragic experience in their own lives. Aristotle’s paradigm works well for an understanding of Lear. Lear is emotionally incontinent, irascible and proud, headstrong and impulsive and pays for that incontinence – he comes to learn of his daughters’ treachery and his own folly, and this discovery is quickly followed by his change in fortune from reigning monarch to homeless madman. That he is prone to such irascibility is made clear by Kent’s words, ‘Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad’. It should be pointed out that, according to Aristotle, the flaw exists in a character of high station with noble characteristics. It is a blot in an otherwise worthy man. Clearly, Lear has held power for a long time and done so successfully. He has maintained the allegiance of Kent, Gloucester, the fool and Cordelia, characters without the malignant egos of those who supplant him. The cause of the eruption at court could be linked to his age, the uncertainty of his future, the fear of his older daughters. He knows Cordelia is the righteous child. The **significance** of the flaw is that it is the initial phase of the tragic action by which Lear undergoes a negative transformation, through which, paradoxically, he becomes ennobled: he identifies with the poor, becomes insightful about the ways of kingship and injustice, and is eventually repentant, and the repentance allows for his reconciliation with Cordelia. The journey into recognition of his daughters’ duplicity, the ejection onto the heath, the mania caused by obsessive desire for revenge, hopeless now that he has not the means by which to exact it, the psychosis in which he hallucinates a trial of the offending women, the reason in madness sequence in which he offers the audience fool-like insights into the nature of corrupt society are beautifully balanced by a return to sanity after the doctor at the French camp orders a sleep, reconciliation with Cordelia following. Gloucester’s flaw is credulity and he undergoes a similar process to Lear. His mistake in trusting Edmund leads to the charge of treason and loss of eyes and his eviction to Dover. He recognises that Edmund is his evil son and loses the title of Earl of Gloucester to him. The **significance** of his pathetic change of fortune, however, is that he gains his own self-knowledge and reconciliation with Edgar. Suffering ennobles. Gloucester is too ready to believe his illegitimate son. Edmund has returned after being away for nine years. Just as the older daughters may well have harboured a grudge against the younger, more favoured sibling, Edmund is indignant that he is disenfranchised from inheritance because of his bastard status. He sees his father as credulous in his belief in astrology and an easy dupe. Like Lear he acts impulsively when the false letter is displayed and thereby sets in motion the tragic trajectory for his own family. He suffers the indignity of hosting brutality – even in his own house he cannot prevent the ejection of Lear, Edmund’s smarmy crawl to the top and the gouging of his own eyes. The consequence for Gloucester is homelessness, suicidal feelings and death, but the reversal of fortune is matched by his recognition of his own folly and reconciliation with Edgar. In general terms, the **significance** of the flaw is that it initiates the tragic journey to self knowledge and reconciliation; both characters demonstrate the idea that suffering leads to truth.