The Theme of Suffering in King Lear
Exploring and Expressing Suffering Within Shakespeare's Play
Dec 2, 2008
Whether from dramatic, literary or psychological viewpoints, the heart of King Lear is in the suffering of the titular King. Although Lear realizes his mistake of disowning Cordelia early on, the play never seeks to show his resolution or redemption, but instead tracks his suffering, which Mark Van Doren described icily as "glacial, inexorable, awful and slow".
Role of Goneril and Regan
Harold Bloom notes that Lear must be seen as "paradigm for greatness…at once father, king and a kind of mortal god", to understand his disempowerment under Goneril and Regan. At their hands, his age changes from a source of wisdom to weakness, changing from a king to merely "a poor old man/As full of grief as age, wretched in both." His authority disappears, and while he curses passionately "-I will do such things-/ What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be/The terrors of the earth", he has no power to realize these.
The sisters cutting his retinue of knights from a hundred to fifty to finally none, mirror the shearing away of his hopes of their piety and love, as well as of his own identity as king. His only remaining dignity is the "noble anger" where he resists tears and their connotations of womanliness and weakness, pledging that "this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws/Or ere I’ll weep", which emphasies greatness, even in his current feeble state.
Significance of Storm Scene
The storm is an important event in the play, both critically and dramatically. Lear’s behaviour within the storm is important in an examination of his suffering.
Gloucester's Parallel Tragedy
The inclusion of Gloucester’s tragedy to parallel Lear’s enhances the play's complexity, and critics have discussed the links between the two greatly.
Where suffering is concerned, what is most dramatically significant might be their language of expression. To Mark Van Doren, Gloucester’s suffering is plain and conventional, where Lear’s, given the privilege of madness, is poetical and lyrical. Juxtaposing their responses to their plight makes this clear, where Gloucester can only say "Alack, alack the day!", Lear states majestically how "When we are born, we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools".
Van Doren sums up: "Each music serves the other-Gloucester’s to measure the height of Lear’s, and Lear’s to pour meaning into the lowly goodness and modesty of Gloucester’s."
Meeting between Lear and gloucester
Harold Bloom referred to this point as the "poetic centre" the play. In Edgar's words, the scene is "matter and impertinency mixed-Reason in madness!", and Lear blends the crazed babbling of a madman with words that show an increased perception of his reality. The following observations are points worthy of further examination:
- Perception of Vulnerability: Lear has finally recognized the falseness of his previous illusion of love by his two elder daughters: ‘They told me I was everything, "tis a lie, I am not ague-proof". His knowledge of self-identity of himself is confronted, but not solved; and he remains powerless against his fallibility.
- Reactions towards Woman: Lear has generalized the wickedness of his two daughters as the wickedness of women: "But to the girdle do the gods inherit;/Beneath is all the fiend’s" is part of an expressive and poetical tirade against women. The roles of women in King Lear are a source of heated discussion.
- Loss of Authority: Lear has lost the faith in a system of justice and retribution: "Plate sin with gold, /And the strong lance of justice hurtles breaks". The loss of the himself, as the king and head of a state is paralleled with the absence of a greater sense of divine order, or nihilism, within the play.
- Anger: Lear has expressed disappointment and anger vividly in previous scenes. However by now, his anger has overcome his language, a mere spondee where he repeats the word kill: "And when I have stol’n upon these son-in-laws,/Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!"
At this point in time, Lear might have come to new realizations, but he is still tortured and wracked in suffering. The only possible comfort he could find, from Cordelia in the next scene is transient, and the play rapidly moves towards its conclusion.
Final scenes
Lear still hopes, even in Cordelia’s defeat, for a happy ending with her: "so we’ll live/And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/At gilded butterflies." Poignant and loving as this is, the next instant Lear holds Cordelia dead in her arms is rightly recognised as one of the most well-known and emotionally powerful scenes in Shakespeare.
Lear’s initial distress, the extinguishing of the vain hope that Cordelia still lives, and Lear’s final words, where he utters bleak line: "never, never, never, never, never", is the culmination of suffering in the play. It ends, as it must, in Lear’s death.
Lear is portrayed as one whose suffering far outstrips the magnitude of his original error. Central to the idea of suffering is the idea of its futile and nihilistic nature, with no cause for optimism and hope, especially with Cordelia’s death. Bloom states that "Suffering achieves its full reality of representation in King Lear, hope receives none", and Lear's pathos allows us no choice but to suffer along with him.
Bibliography:
- The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus
- Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom
- Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber
- Shakespeare by Mark Van Doren
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