Friday, January 16, 2015

Shakespeare Using Gloucester and Lear

Prompt: Compare and contrast Gloucester and Lear, focusing on their choices, their adherence to kingly or noble ideals, their relationships with their children, their level of wisdom and humility (at the beginning and end of the story), and/or other parallels you might find interesting. Be sure to integrate quotes from the text to support your comparisons. 


     Through the differences and similarities between Lear and Gloucester, Shakespeare reaches his audience in a relatable way in King Lear. Though Shakespeare wrote King Lear based on several older stories, he added the sub-plot of Gloucester and his children. Because of the addition of Gloucester to the story, it is clear that Shakespeare meant for the correlations and contrasts between Lear and Gloucester to add to the thematic development in King Lear. For example, Gloucester’s physical blindness can be seen in Lear, when he is blind to the truth of his daughters’ love for him; these two instances of sightlessness makes the theme of blindness in King Lear more poignant. 

     Though Lear loses his sanity and Gloucester loses his sight, in some way, each also has the other’s problem. In the beginning for the book when Lear is starting to lose his sanity, he begins to lose sight of the truth, a figurative blindness. When he finally learns the truth of Goneril and Regan, Lear laments, “O, Fool, I shall go mad!” In contrast, after first becoming physically blinded, Gloucester slowly begins to lose hints of his sanity. His state of suffering—emotional and physical—and sightlessness was enough to send him a little over the edge. Causing one to think about one's own sightlessness and loss of reality, these contrasts and similarities between the two men’s encounters with the metaphors of sight and insanity add depth to the reading of King Lear.

     Gloucester and Lear both have opportunities to learn from their decisions and those of their children. When Gloucester discovers that Edmund has been lying to him, Gloucester is beside himself in grief and longs to see Edgar, the son that he has previously written off, saying, “O dear son Edgar…/Might I but live to see thee in my touch.” When Lear learns that his older daughters are deceiving him, Lear becomes angry and upset, but when he finds his youngest daughter Cordelia, his disposition lightens and he turns happier. In these circumstances of their children’s betrayals and reunions with their faithful children, the two fathers have very similar reactions. 

     Gloucester and Lear relate to their children in very different ways. Being wealthy, both Lear and Gloucester have money, property, and titles that their children could inherit. King Lear plans to gift his children with their inheritance; Gloucester’s Edmund devises a plot to use his father’s goodness and steal his brother’s inheritance. Gloucester and Lear approach their children’s love and loyalty for them differently as well. Though both listen to words, not actions, Lear gives each of his daughters a chance to speak for themselves. He goes to all of his daughters, asking whether each loves him. Imploring Cordelia to “mend her speech” when her expression of love is simple, he wants to believe she loves him more greatly than her sisters. Unlike Lear, however, Gloucester only listens to what Edmund has to say; when Edmund goes to his father first, Gloucester does not even attempt to ask Edgar for what he might have to say. Though Lear and Gloucester both take their children at their word, Gloucester is not concerned with talking to both of his sons before reaching a decision about them, as Lear does with his daughters. Lear is desperate for his daughters to love him; Gloucester is ready to believe, without much thought, that Edgar is devising a plot to kill him. 


     In Shakespeare’s play, Gloucester and Lear are similar in many ways. They have similar lessons to learn and they are both affected by their children’s actions. Though in different ways, the themes of insanity, blindness, and family love are all present in both Gloucester and Lear. Not surprisingly, their reactions to and experiences of similar situations have their differences; they are different people. Through the characters of Gloucester and Lear, Shakespeare portrays how two people will respond to similar situations in very different ways. Since people rarely have the exact same circumstances in their life and they rarely respond to them in the same way, it would be hard to relate to a story with characters with identical lives, and this is what makes Shakespeare’s plays universal and beloved by so many.

--This is, obviously, an essay on Shakespeare's play King Lear.  I got a 97 on this paper (though I've already made some of the slight changes my teacher suggested). I want to publish my papers on my blog, but I get so caught up in the actually writing-of-the-papers that I have been forgetting to do that, so, as I think of it when needing a break, I'll try to catch up.