Love Between Parents and Children in Shakespeare's King Lear
One of the play’s central tragedies is that the younger generation has forgotten (or rejected) its bond to the older generation.
The entire plot of “King Lear” hinges on the relationship between parents and children. Thematically, that relationship forms both the deepest tragedy and the deepest hope in the play. “Lear” is a bleak drama—among Shakespeare’s bleakest—yet even so, instances of quiet, faithful love emerge in the play, like distant pricks of starlight not quite blotted out by stormy clouds.
A Loyal Daughter
At the beginning of the work, old King Lear, looking to lay aside the heavy burden of the crown, “to shake all cares and business” from his old age, plans to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. But each daughter’s share of the kingdom will depend on how profusely she proclaims her love for him. The more love she shows, the greater her inheritance.
Lear’s two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, gush over their father, wildly and exaggeratedly protesting their love. They claim that he is dearer to them than eyesight, freedom, health, beauty, honor, and life itself. But their tongues are venom, and their eyes are sharp with greed.
Old Lear, blinded by the flattery he was seeking, is absurdly pleased and doles out great amounts of land and riches to them. He then turns to his youngest and favorite daughter, Cordelia, expecting her to offer him the most pleasing testament of love yet.
She, however, sickened by the false flattery of her older sisters, refuses to follow suit. “I love your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less,” she tells her father, who flies into a rage at these words and banishes Cordelia from his sight.
This pivotal opening scene sets in motion both the action of the play and many central themes: blindness, betrayal, unjust suffering, and fidelity. Now in possession of their inheritance, Goneril and Regan unmask their true selves, becoming more and more cruel to Lear and eventually refusing even to give him shelter. Driven mad with grief, Lear wanders the wild moors in a thunderstorm, with only a handful of faithful followers.
Parallelism in ‘King Lear’
One foil for Lear is the aging Earl of Gloucester—another somewhat foolish old man who doesn’t understand his children (in this case, his two sons) nearly as well as he ought to. Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund, aims to steal the inheritance from his brother, Edgar, then kill his father for the money and title of earl. Edmund frames his brother and manages to turn Gloucester against him.
Gloucester’s fortunes quickly decline, almost parallel to Lear’s. Regan literally blinds Gloucester for his loyalty to her father, the king. Like the king, Gloucester is cast out on his own to wander, blindly, about the countryside.
Herein lies one of the play’s central tragedies: The younger generation has forgotten (or rejected) its bond to the older generation, including the bond of duty and justice that demands that the young care for the old. In an ugly upsetting of the natural law and common decency, the children selfishly abandon and cast out their elderly parents to fend for themselves.
Honor Thy Father and Mother
While it’s true that both Lear and Gloucester acted blindly and irrationally and did much to bring about their own downfall, Shakespeare nevertheless depicts them compassionately, while portraying the ungrateful children harshly. “Honor thy father and mother” isn’t a conditional commandment, Shakespeare seems to say. Even if your father is conceited, blind, pompous, selfish, and unwise, the commandment still holds.
But if the failure of fathers toward their children and children toward their fathers forms the core melancholy of the play, it’s also true that the few children who remain faithful to their parents cause the play’s tenderest, most beautiful, and most hopeful moments.
In Act IV, Scene I, the fugitive Edgar comes upon his blinded father, Gloucester. He is cut to the quick to see his father in such a state because, contrary to Edmund’s lies, Edgar loves and reveres his father. Blind Gloucester, not knowing his son’s identity, asks him to lead him to a high cliff. Edgar agrees, not yet revealing his true identity.
Edgar knows that his father intends to commit suicide. So he only pretends to lead him to a real cliff, describing for the old man the immense “precipice” before them. As he says to the audience, “Why I do trifle thus with his despair/ Is done to cure it.” Edgar knows that he needs to help his father see what a miracle life is, despite its burdens and sorrows.
Edgar pretends to leave his father at the edge of the imaginary cliff. Gloucester leaps forward, thinking he’s jumping to his death, but in reality he falls on his face. Then, Edgar pretends to be someone who has found Gloucester’s body at the foot of the cliff and is amazed that he survived the fall.
The disguised Edgar tells him, “Ten masts at each make not the altitude/ Which thou has perpendicularly fell/ Thy life’s a miracle.” Gloucester takes the experience to heart, saying, “Henceforth I'll bear/ Affliction.”
Here, Shakespeare penned one of his greatest scenes—maybe one of the greatest scenes in all literature. Though it involves trickery, Edgar is concerned not just with his father’s physical welfare but also with his spiritual welfare. The scene stands in a world apart with such moments as the meeting between old Priam and brilliant Achilles in “The Iliad,” or when Dante and Virgil cross through the center of the earth and begin to climb again toward the stars in “The Inferno”—scenes that echo through our souls with a resonance we can hardly explain.
Cordelia and Lear
The same can be said of Cordelia with regard to Lear. Although she didn’t spill many words of love and praise at the play’s beginning, her actions prove that she has far more love for her father than her lying sisters. “I love your Majesty/ According to my bond,” she said, which he took to mean that her love was forced, limited, and the result of a stiff sense of duty.
Cordelia’s love is much stronger than her sisters’ because it’s based not just on emotion but also on justice: what she owes her father in light of the gift of life he gave her. What Lear took to be a kind of legalistic love was actually a higher love based on principles. It wasn’t the effusive feeling that Regan and Goneril displayed.
At the end of the play, when virtually everyone has abandoned Lear, Cordelia and her husband return to help him. She’s shocked at the treatment he received at the hands of her cruel older sisters. Bending down toward her sick, half-mad father, she says: “O my dear father, restoration hang/ Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss/ Repair those violent harms that my two sisters/ Have in thy reverence made.”
Cordelia and Lear reconcile before the evil sisters capture them. Lear delivers one of the most hauntingly beautiful speeches in all of Shakespeare:
Let’s away to prison
We two alone will sing like birds i‘ the’ cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.
Though Lear is partly out of his mind when he utters these strange words, there’s still some truth to his speech. Through their suffering, forgiveness, and reconciliation, he and Cordelia have achieved a freedom that Goneril and Regan will never know. Through suffering, they have entered into the mystery of the universe. They no longer have anything to lose, and all the busyness of the world and politics can no longer touch them. Death itself—which is inevitable at this point—cannot tarnish the beauty of their reunion.
Shakespeare critic A.C. Bradley put it beautifully: “The heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed, is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he appears; is, in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it.”
Cordelia dies in Lear’s arms and he follows her shortly thereafter. The ending is certainly tragic, and yet, as Bradley suggested, something in Lear and Cordelia transcends the tragedy. Though Shakespeare gives the audience a scarce glimmer of hope, the play as a whole and especially its ending suggests that reality is more than tragedy alone. As Bradley says: “If we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted that they had ceased to be strictly tragic.”
[This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times: https://www.theepochtimes.com/bright/love-between-parents-and-children-in-shakespeares-king-lear-5793353]
This is so beautiful a description. I realize how lacking my knowledge of classical literature is, but you give me you're welcome glimpse of understanding. Thank you.