"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
rough hew them how we will." These
words from Hamlet are echoed, even more
pessimistically, in Shakespeare's later
play, The Tragedy of King Lear where
Gloucester says: "Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill
us for their sport". In Lear, the
characters are subjected to the various tragedies of life over and over
again.
An abundance of cyclic imagery in Lear shows that good people are abused and
wronged regardless of their own noble
deeds or intentions. Strapped to a wheel
of fire, humans suffer and endure, prosper and decline, their very existence
imaged as a voyage out and a return. The
movement from childhood to age and back again, the many references to fortune
whose wheel spins humans downward even as it lifts, the abundance of natural
cycles which are seen as controlling experience, even perhaps the movement of
play itself from order to chaos to restoration of order to division again.
Throughout the text, the movements of celestial
bodies are used to account for human
action and misfortune. Just as the stars
in their courses are fixed in the skies, so do the characters view their lives
as caught in a pattern they have no power to change. Lear sets the play in motion in banishing
Cordelia when he swears "by all the operation of the orbs from whom we
exist and cease to be" that his decision "shall not be
revoked". How like the scene in
Julius Caesar wherein Caesar says
"For I am constant as the Northern star" Lear vows to be resolute but dies regretting
his decision at the hands of his daughters who claim love him "more than
word can wield" and are "alone felicitate" in his presence.
That Edmund disbelieves in the influence of the
stars adds to the play's recurring theme that part of our fate is our
character; that we choose our lot in
life by how we choose to act. Similarly,
in Lear Gloucester's feelings predict
what is to come when he says "These late eclipses of the sun and moon
portend no good..." And because of this Gloucester begins to
envision a world where "Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers
divide..." While his father
misunderstands the importance of the celestial bodies, his bastard son, Edmund
denies the importance of the movements of the heavenly bodies. He calls it "an excellent foppery"
to "make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars." (Just as in Julius Caesar we learn that "... The fault ... lies
not in our stars, but in ourselves "),
Edmund in Lear echoes this
sentiment when he says "as if we were villains by necessity, fools by
compulsion." But what he does not
seem to see is that by enacting his plot against his brother Edgar he fulfills
Gloucester's prediction and that "Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and
all ruinous disorders" must be soon to come. And we see in the play that these things
do come to pass, not because of the
movements of the planets, but because of the flaws in human nature.
The stars are not the only things by which the
characters believe their lives to be governed.
Characters throughout the play talk of the influence of fortune on their lives. When Cordelia is banished, she has no
"fortune", but is accepted by France.
Cordelia, with no wealth of her own suddenly in France's eyes she is "Most rich being poor, most
choice forsaken, most loved, despised" .
Edmund too, seems to have no fortune of his
own. But this he attributes to mere
luck, and says that if all goes as he plans "The base shall top the legitimate,
I grow, I prosper" . After
Gloucester's speech about the eclipses foretelling discord, Edmund twists his
father's words against Edgar when the bastard tells his brother "These
eclipses portend ... unnaturalness between child and parent, ...divisions in
state...banishment of friends ...and I know not what."
The first rise of fortune in the play is when
Lear prepares to divide his kingdom among his daughters. He puts them to the test, asking them how
much they love him. The first two daughters
flatter the old king but Cordelia whose "love is richer then [her]
tongue" can only say that she loves her father as much as is her duty, no
more nor less . When her portion of the
kingdom is divided between her sisters, the two of them plot to get rid of the
king, because he is "full of the changes of age...". Goneril suggests they conspire against him
("...let's hit together..."), because she believes their fortunes will be switched if they let him
have any authority ("...if our father carry authority with such
dispositions as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend
us."). Thus as Cordelia's fortune
plummets -- so does Lear's, although he doesn't realise it at first. Indeed, the only one who seems to realize the
gravity of Lear's predicament is his fool.
The fool mocks Kent's devotion to the king, warning him to "Let go
thy hold" because Lear is "a
great wheel which rolls down a hill" which will "break thy
neck".
Kent's "fortune" rises and falls
throughout the play. Before he defends
Cordelia to her father, he is an Earl.
Then, he is banished and his lands are forfeit. Then, he returns to Lear, incognito and offers his services to the king. Later, as he defends Lear's honor, he is
thrown into thrown into the stocks by Regan and Cornwall, and he pleads " Fortune ... smile once more and turn
thy wheel" While in the stocks, he
says good night to "fortune"
and hopes for better luck the next day.
He is released from the stocks only to be cast out into a terrible
tempest. Again fortune is arbirtary only
to the point to which
Gloucester's fortunes fall in the play
too. He is betrayed by his bastard son
Edmund. For his loyalty to the king he
is stripped of his title and his lands, his eyes are ripped from their sockets,
and he is thrown out "to smell his way to Dover". Ironically, Gloucester, like Lear, is led by
one whom he hates yet fails to recognize: his son Edgar. Gloucester at the center of the play learns
of Edmund's treachery when his eyes are put out, and the fourth and fifth
acts bring with them for him a descent
into despair and an achievement of hope and reconciliation. It is mainly in terms of this plot that the time-honoured
image of orderly reversal, the slow inexorable turning of the wheel, is used as
the dying Edmund says, "The wheel has come full circle". Edgar to whom he speaks has concurrently
risen to a share in the government of the island.
The Gloucester family, it seems, thinks in
terms of the wheel-the natural course of events, the cycle of nature, the wheel
of fortune. Edgar sees not worldly
fortune but happiness and misery in the same image: "The lamentable change
is from the best. The worst returns to laughter." and again O world! But that thy strange mutations
make us hate thee, Life would not yield to age.
A moment later, his blinded father appears before him, Edgar exclaims:
"The worst is not So long as we can say 'this is the worst'".
The wheel is greater than he had thought and in
it's revolution has deeper yet to go.
Gloucester himself perhaps thinks of himself as falling from the wheel
of fortune is that grotesque act of despair (in the very presence of grace), in
which he blesses Edgar as if he were absent, and finds out in the most physical
way on Dover cliff that he has nowhere to fall or fall from but his son's
care. 'Thy life's a miracle,' Edgar
says, on two levels of meaning, and Gloucester resolves:"Henceforth I'll
bear Affliction till it do cry out itself 'Enough, enough', and die". From that point affliction ends for him; for
him are Edgar's words spoken of a auspicious cycle:
"Men must
endure Their going hence even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is
all."
In
the last scene of the play, however,
Lear is is reunited with Cordelia. Although the two are about to be taken to
prison Lear swears his devotion to Cordelia by another celestial globe. Comforting Cordellia, he says that he and she
will watch the changes of the court, see "Who's in, Who's out" but they
will outlast the various
"... great ones that ebb and flow by the moon". In Lear, the death of hubris that gives rise
to the humility of love This is as much a cycle in most of literature, Lear
included, as is birth to death. In short death of the old precedes birth of the
new. For Lear, it is a death of self-ignorance that gives rise to the birth of
self knowledge.
As the play progresses, it becomes more and
more clear that all the smaller cycles point towards a big one. This cycle's images are seen again and again
throughout the play. The images are
those of "nurseries" and old men.
Here "fathers are as wards to the sons" and old men
"Crawl towards death" like newborn babes. This is the aging cycle. It's cyclic images show us King Lear reduced
to the role of child, helpless and dependent on his two wicked daughters.
Then as now, when Lear, the symbol for the
oldest generation, gives his power to his daughters (the younger generation)
they immediately begin to treat him as if he
were the child and they the parents.
Within the first month of his decision, Goneril has begun to refer to
him as being in his "dotage",
that "old fools are babes again"
Regan, too after receiving her inheritance says [aside] of her father,
"Tis the infirmity of age:"
The relationship between the father and child
is perverted in the Gloucester family , as well just as Lear's daughters
deceive him with good intentions, so too does Edmund deceive his father. Edmund, stepping into his father's rights
and title says 'the younger rises when the old doth fall". Like Lear's daughters, Edmund conspires
against his father and his brother to steal his father's land and his brother's
inheritance, exclaiming: "let me if
not by birth, have lands by wit."
As the play progresses, we see more and more
images of Lear as a child rather than an old man. In his daughter Goneril's house Lear's fool
tells him he has "Made thy daughters thy mothers" and that now he has
only "that [he] was born with".
Rather than being obedient, Lear's children use their newly-won powers
to make of him "an obedient father".
Lear quickly realizes this and his mistake. But having given away his power, Lear is as
helpless as a child. Perhaps Regan says
it best when she says
"O sir, you
are old,Nature in you stands on the very verge of his confine." You should
be ruled, and led."
Some people choose to live within the cycles in
the world, some choose to deny them.
Those who choose to live within them are stretched out on the rack of
the world. They suffer for no reason and
die needlessly. Those who deny them
die too. But we see that they have lived without virtue. King Lear begins the play acting more like a
child than a man, much less a king. As
the play progresses and Lear's suffering increases, we see him reaching out
more and more to others. (stick in
the virtue spiel) Necessity changes the
evil things into good ones, but we are witnessing a heavenlier transformation
in Lear's charitable concern for his fellow creature.People rebel against
greed. The stars aren't responsible for what happens to us. Luck doesn't cause good or bad things to
happen to us but the fault, the tragedy of human existence and even the brief
moments of love and beauty that we experience lie not in the stars but in
ourselves. Rosalie Colie said it best
when she wrote "Lives lived w/out virtue aren't worth living."
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