William Shakespeare’s King Lear is a complex and intriguing play about the intricate nature of family love and the boundaries of affection. On a superficial level of understanding, the play is about a King who foolishly demands and expects absolute devotion from all around him, according to his status, but soon discovers loyalty and true love does not appear as he desires. Another interpretation may be that it is a play about a father and the complicated – often ruthless – nature of love and the whirlwind of emotions and consequences associated with it.
The love between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is particularly complex and fascinating. Cordelia is the only daughter, and only female, who is there for Lear at the end of the play. Lear comes to realise – through his madness – that Cordelia’s love is genuine, and he must come to terms with his foolishness of turning her away during the initial scene. Arguably, Lear’s dependence on his daughters – apparent most strongly towards the end of the play as his madness overwhelms him – suggests a need for affection beyond the boundaries of expectation: a craving for maternal love.
Exploring Expected Affection from Lear in ‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare
The character of Lear is most definitely aware of his status of not only a King, but also the patriarchal figurehead of the family unit; he believes it is these things which make him a God, to which everyone else becomes vicegerents to. Thus he demands extreme levels of affection, which he fully expects to receive.
Lear puts enormous emphasis on his expectations at the beginning of the play, making repetitive references to “offices of nature” to which he believes everyone must comply, for it would be “unnatural” for it not to be so. He believes it is his right to receive unconditional and utter devotion from all other mortals, most indefinitely his family; his confidence in his belief causes him to dramatically divide his Kingdom – something which to the Elizabethan audience in Shakespearean times would have been a preposterous act. Cordelia is unwilling, unlike her sisters, to amuse his expectations, and tease him with play-acting ideals of love; subsequently, King Lear – disgusted at the thought that his expectations will not come true – tosses Cordelia out and adamantly refuses to see her again.
Co-Dependent Love and Madness in ‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare
Lear’s fierce belief in his expectations gradually descends into severe co-dependency and “madness” as he realises – throughout the events of the play – that these expectations cannot be fulfilled. His punishment for his “blindness” is the madness he experiences, in the form of a “great rage”.
King Lear becomes completely overwhelmed during the concluding scenes by the “great decay” and “rack of the tough world” of which he has suffered at its expense and “decayed” that he retreats to the moors, where he goes mad with disbelief. When he was once master of – he believed – nature itself, as a God, he realises he has become ‘slave’ to the nature of the weather. The sheer, almost unbearable, ferocity of the weather engulfs him, in violent pathetic fallacy, and produces tremendous nostalgia and the aching desire for affection.
At the end of the play, and at the height of Lear’s madness, Cordelia returns. At this point, Lear is a broken man desperately craving genuine affection. His daughter, actually displaying the nature of affections he so stubbornly wanted in the beginning, comforts him, still seeks “benediction” and temporarily satisfies him until her death. Cordelia’s death – a final, spectacular and most painful punishment for Lear’s foolishness – causes Lear to die of a broken heart and mind.
Sexual Frustration and Lack of Maternal Presence in ‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare
Lear does not have a wife. It could be argued that the affection King Lear craves was in fact born from a desire to release his sexual frustration.
The act of dividing his kingdom at the very beginning of the play, juxtaposed with the mock wedding ceremony for Cordelia with France and Burgundy, centralises and emphasises his role as King and father, perhaps exaggerated to compensate for lack of maternal presence. Most especially during the ceremony, his presence symbolises Cordelia’s virginity and as Coppélia Kahn suggests, in her essay entitled ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, this could show a ‘darker purpose’ in giving her away. Either this could be a portrayal of the extent of Lear’s sexual frustration or, like Kahn implies, it may have awakened a deeper need for Cordelia as a daughter-mother.
The concept of a daughter-mother figure is hinted at by Lear himself, even if at this moment he does not realise the extent of what he is saying, when he states that he ‘lov’d her [Cordelia] most, and thought to set my rest /On her kind nursery’. The concept of the ‘nursery’ image implies that Lear in fact considers himself a child, and that his expectations are to be nurtured by a motherly figure. His madness was perhaps rage which obscured him from the truth behind his motives; it is arguably only after Cordelia’s death at the end of the play that Lear comes to term with the fact that it is not possible for Cordelia to satisfy all his wants.
The play is powerful, insightful and beautifully crafted, which is just a few of the reasons it has bravely stood the test of time. The love and natures of affection presented in the play between Cordelia and King Lear are perhaps the most captivating and complex, and are entirely open to in-depth interpretation.
Sources:
- ‘Introduction’ by Professor G. K. Hunter in the New Penguin Edition of ‘King Lear’, first published in Penguin Books in 1972
- ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’ by Coppélia Kahn, From Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago and London, 1986), pp. 33-49
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