Relationships in ‘King Lear’

Different types of relationships in ‘King Lear’

• Father and daughters• Brothers• Sisters• Mother and children• Husband and wife• Master and servant • Lovers• King and kingdom• Legitimate and illegitimate children

AO4 – family in Shakespeare’s time

• Patriarchy –governed by father / eldest living male• Primogeniture – exploited by Edmund’s fake letter

from Edmund; ‘the policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us til our oldness cannot relish them.’

• Dowries – secures husband and jointure• Illegitimate children – excluded from inheritance and

primogeniture; Edmund ‘not a son by the order of law’• Emotional bonds – bonds of love and duty alluded to

in Jacobean sermons, conduct books and the Bible• Masters and servants – servants fully part of a

Renaissance household: Kent and the Fool

The ‘bond’

• ‘I love your majesty/ According to my bond, no more no less.’ (Cordelia, 1.1)

• You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties back as are right fit,/ Obey you, love you and most honour you.’(Cordelia, 1.1)

• ‘the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father’ (Gloucester, 1.2)

• ‘the child was bound to the father’ (Edmund. 2.1)• ‘thou better knowst/ The offices of nature, bond of

childhood,/ Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude.’ (Lear, 2.2)

• ‘but I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire…’ (Lear, 4.7)

Fathers and daughters

• ‘I loved her most, and thought to set my rest/ On her kind nursery.’ (1.1)

• ‘By day and night he wrongs me. Every hour/ He flashes into one gross crime or other/ That sets us all at odds. I’ll not endure it.’ (Goneril, 1.3.4-6)

• Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a childThan the sea-monster! (1.4)

• Visual emblem of kneeling – happens in 2.2.344 with Regan: ‘On my knees I beg’ and 4.7.59 with Cordelia: ‘she restrains him as he tries to kneel

• ‘…this tempest in my mind/Doth from my senses take all feeling else,/ Save what beats there, filial ingratitude.’ (3.4.12-14)

• ‘aged father’s right’ (Cordelia, 4.4)

Edmund

• Now, gods, stand up for bastards. (1.2)• This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we

are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! up for bastards! (1.2)

• ‘What you have charged me with, that I have done/ And more, much more; the time will bring it out;/ Tis past and so am I. ‘

Edmund: ungrateful child or Renaissance self-fashioning?

• Narrative of ‘self-fashioning’ tricks the other characters (although it is less clear in Lear the extent to which Edmund causes the key downfalls; Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out because he helps Lear)

• Stephen Greenblatt calls moments like this ‘the improvisation of power’ – authority is established in moments where order (political, theological, sexual etc) is violated – like Marlowe’s heroes, the renaissance self-fashioner seeks to shatter restraints. Esp. compared to people like Kent with his selfless loyal service.

• His actions and behaviour allow us to feel little redemption –betrayal of father with letter concerning French invasion, stolen from his father causes Gloucester’s punishment.

• Noticeably, evidence given against his father shows a sanctimonious lack of remorse and elsewhere in the play makes it hard to pity him (and likewise, believe him when he is remorseful at the end). For example, Act 3, sc5 ‘How malicious is my fortune, that I must repent to be just?’ / ‘I will persevere in my course of loyalty, though the conflict be sore between that and my blood.’

Edgar – significance of transformation?

‘How now brother Edmund, what serious contemplation are you in?’ (1.2)

My face I’ll grime with filth,Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knotsAnd with presented nakedness outfaceThe winds and persecutions of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary.”

(2.2.180-185)

Let's exchange charity.I am no less in blood than thou art,

Edmund;If more, the more thou hast wrong'd me.My name is Edgar, and thy father's son.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vicesMake instruments to plague us:

The dark and vicious place where thee he got

Cost him his eyes.(5.3)

The weight of this sad time we must obey;Speak what we feel, not what we ought to

say.The oldest hath borne most: we that are

youngShall never see so much, nor live so long.

(5.3)

The importance of the trial scene – 3.6

• Lear’s imaginings of hell-fire as a punishment for for Goneril and Regan, blurs lines further between demonic/ powerful. (NB FOLIO version doesn’t include the trial scene; see notes in text. Directors generally love it)

• Edgar: ‘thou robed man of justice’ Fool: ‘yoke-fellow of equity’ –truth in madness

• Edgar: ‘let us deal justly’ – true role in play, sharply contrasted with nonsense verse that follows. Edgar/ fool interchangeable here; his verse about shepherd and flock could be criticism of Lear though (prompting the question – who is on trial here?)

• Trial interspersed with comic interlude of fool (I took you for a joint stool – absurd) and Kent discussing Lear’s ‘patience’, or lack of here. Lear still wants justice here for filial ingratitude- not quite reached enlightenment/ realisation. This is re-enforced by borrowing of Harsnett’s demonic language/ accounts of trials or exorcisms. The hell is in his mind: ‘fire, corruption in the place’

Hard hearted father or justified sinner?

• Lear : ‘Let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?’ – physically hard; verb suggests breaking it up/ pulling apart to discover cause.

• See Arden notes; some Lears stab/ gauge out heart – in Gambon’s production, Lear accidentally stabs the fool through a pillow and kills him. Biblically, hardness of heart is a punishment for the wicked. > Does Lear have a hard heart?

Sins of the fathers?

• You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties back as are right fit,/ Obey you, love you and most honour you.’(Cordelia, 1.1)

• ‘Yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter,/ Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,/ Which I needs must call mine. Thou art a boil,/ A plague sore or embossed carbuncle/ In my corrupted blood.’(2.2)

• ‘Some good I mean to do despite mine own nature’ (Edmund, 5.2)

Bonds beyond the embodiment of a moral virtue or truth – sons/daughters as real

people• ‘What is important to Gloucester is not insight

but a relationship which the only possible metaphor is physical contact.’ (Paul Alpers)

• ‘Might I live to see thee in my touch/ I’d say I had eyes again.’ (Gloucester)

• ‘Look upon me, Sir.’ (Cordelia)

• ‘For as I am a man, I think this lady be my child, Cordelia’ (Lear)

Sample essay questions

• By exploring the dramatic presentation of parents and children, evaluate the view that ‘neither parents nor children can escape the consequences of each other’s actions.’

• By exploring the dramatic presentation of family relationships, evaluate the view that ‘the breakdown of relationships is to blame for the chaotic events King Lear.’

• ‘According to my bond/ No more, no less.’ By exploring the dramatic presentation of family bonds in King Lear, evaluate this view.