Interpretation of ‘King Lear’ by Ed Friedlander
extract:
“Themes and Image Patterns
Who is it that can tell me who I am? — King Lear Nature
The Elizabethans believed, or pretended to believe, that the natural world reflected a hierarchy that mirrored good government and stable monarchy. This is a common enough idea in old books from various cultures. Even our scientific age talks both about “laws of nature” and “good government through good laws”, although of course we know the essential difference.
Shakespeare’s era contrasted “nature” and “art” (i.e., human-made decorations, human-made luxuries and technologies, human-made artistic productions), just as we talk about “essential human nature” contrasted to “culture”. Shakespeare’s era also contrasted “natural” and “unnatural” behaviors; the latter would include mistreating family members, opposing the government, and various sexual activities not intended for procreation.
King Lear deals with how children and parents treat each other, whether human society is the product of nature or something we create so as to live better than animals do, and whether human nature is fundamentally selfish or generous. Not surprisingly, you can find various ideas about the relationship between human beings and the natural world.
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- You already know that 57 different animals are mentioned in the play.
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- Lear tells Cordelia that neither human nature nor royal dignity can tolerate the way she has insulted him.
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- Lear tells the King of France that “nature is ashamed” to have produced a child like Cordelia, whose lack of love is so contrary to nature. King Lear expects people to be naturally virtuous, in other words, to tell him the lies he wants to hear.
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- The King of France suggests that Cordelia has a “tardiness in nature”, i.e., that sometime’s it’s natural to be inarticulate. France sees nature as the source of human frailties, rather than vice.
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- Edmund begins, “Thou, Nature, art my goddess.” Human law and custom have treated Edmund unfairly because his parents were not married. Edmund intends to look out for himself, like an animal. Edmund sees nature as the opposite of human virtue.
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- Stupid Gloucester, deceived by Edmund, considers Edgar’s supposed plot to murder him to be contrary to nature (“unnatural”, “brutish”).
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- Gloucester believes in astrology. Gloucester thinks that the eclipses, which result from natural causes, still have unnatural effects, causing the breakdown of human society. Edmund doesn’t believe in astrology. He says he was born rough and self-centered, and that the stars had nothing to do with it. Later, Kent believes the stars must account for the inexplicable differences in people’s attitudes. Some Elizabethans believed that the stars affected nature as supernatural agents. Others believed that they were powerful natural forces.
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- Edmund remarks that Edgar’s nature is gentle and naive, and (at the end) that he will do one last good deed “in spite of mine own nature.” (Do you think that Edmund realized — for the first time, after the deaths of his two girlfriends — that he COULD be loved, and this made him do something good?” Edmund’s remark about acting against “his nature” reminds us of the ongoing scientific and political controversies over how much of an individual’s behavior is genetically programmed, how much is learned and conditioned, and how much one is responsible. (“Nature vs. nurture”; “innate vs. cultural”, and so forth.)
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- King Lear, thinking of Cordelia’s “most small fault”, laments the way it scrambled his mind (“wrenched my frame of nature from its fixed place”).
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- King Lear also calls on “nature” as a goddess, to punish Goneril with infertility, or else give her a baby that grows up to hate her (“a thwart disnatured torment”).
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- Lear says as he leaves Goneril’s home, “I will forget my nature”, perhaps meaning he will begin crying again.
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- Gloucester jokes that Edmund is “loyal and natural”. The latter means both “illegitimate”, and that he cares for his own flesh-and-blood as a son should. Regan’s husband speaks of Edmund’s “nature of such deep trust”, i.e., his trustworthy character is inborn.
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- Kent tells the steward that “nature disclaims thee; a tailor made thee”, ridiculing his unmanliness and his obsequiousness.
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- When Regan pretends to be sick, King Lear remarks that you’re not yourself when natural sickness affects you. “We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body.” There’s a foreshadowing here.
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- Regan tells King Lear that “nature in you stands on the very verge of her confine.” In other words, you’re getting too old to make your own decisions, and Regan’s behavior is only that of a good, natural daughter.
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- We’ve already seen (“allow not nature more than nature needs…”) King Lear says that it is superfluous luxuries that raise us above the natural level of animals. He will soon change his mind.
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- Kent and the other basically good characters see the treatment of Lear and Gloucester as unnatural. Albany says to Goneril, “That nature which condemns itself in origin cannot bordered certain in itself” — i.e., if you mistreat your own parent, what kind of person must you be? Writers who talk about the Elizabethans believing in cosmic hierarchy and so forth will see a moral warning against deviating from nature: If you have violated nature by being less than generous to your parent, your self-centeredness will grow and you will become morally worse than an animal.
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- King Lear calls on the storm to “crack nature’s moulds” and end the human race.
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- Kent urges King Lear to seek shelter, since “man’s nature cannot carry the affliction nor the force” and “the tyranny of the open night’s too rough for nature to endure.”
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- King Lear, crazy, asks whether Regan’s hard-heartedness is the result of natural disease or chemistry or something perhaps cultural or perhaps supernatural. “Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness?”
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- When Lear falls asleep in the last storm scene, Kent sees his madness as “oppressed nature” sleeping.
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- Cordelia is said to “redeem nature from the general curse” brought by the other two daughters. With people like Cordelia in the world, one could not say the human race is generally bad by nature.
- The physician calls sleep “our foster-nurse of nature.” Readers may remember Macbeth, who after committing the “unnatural” crime of killing a king, becomes an insomniac.
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- King Lear, with the insight of madness, decorates himself with wild flowers.
You can use these various ideas about what’s “natural” and what’s not to develop a good paper.
Thomas Hobbes observed that the lives of wild animals and primitive people are mostly “nasty, brutish, and short”. Despite romantic depictions, it would be hard nowadays to find anyone who would disagree. Nowadays, most people believe that culture is something that we invent so that we can fall in love, create works of art and music, remember the past, and enjoy a reasonable prospect of good health, personal security, and choosing our own paths through life. If most of us no longer believe that a king’s sovereignty mirrors the harmony of a well-run natural world, we can still find fundamental human issues treated in King Lear.
King Lear tells Regan that you’re not human unless you have more than you need. (“Allow not nature more than nature needs…”) Then in the storm, King Lear cries out that only the poorest person, who owes nothing to anyone (not even the animals), is truly human (“… the thing itself.”) Which do you think is right?
In I.iv., King Lear himself introduces the question, “Who am I?” in the passage that begins “Doth any here know me?…” and ends with “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
And if you want to keep it very simple, just notice this. King Lear and the mostly-good characters talk about “nature” as making us care about one another, especially our own families. Edmund talks about “nature” as making us care only about ourselves.
Who is right? I can’t tell you. You have a lifetime to decide for yourself. “
English Literature Reigns ! 