Symbols and Motifs in King Lear

The issue of artificeness is associated most obviously with Gloucester, who is blinded in the course of the play. It is peculiarly right for Gloucesters eyes to be the organs through which he is tortured. Gloucester image he adage the truth most his countersigns, plainly was in fact blind. With his eyes put out he does indeed see the truth. Gloucester before he lost his eyes was spiritu both in entirelyy blind, and could non tell the difference between a good son and a bad (Muir, lx). It is this physical measly that brings out the long asthenic moral stamina that has underlain his sympathy. Losing his eyes enables him to reach heroic and tragic proportions. He indisputablely has the right to say, All dark and comfortless (III, vii, 84). thither is no irritating shadow of egotism on his accounts of his predicament. And when he learns that Edmund has blackleged him, his response is astounding and wonderful O my follies Then Edgar was abused. / Kind gods, forgive me that and prosper him (III, vii, 90-1). He knows that his injury to Edgar can never be forgivenYou cannot see your way.I have no way, and t here(predicate)fore want no eyesI stumbled when I saw.(IV, i, 17-19).Gloucesters blindness is also a reflection of the unreformed Lears supreme folly, and his inability to tell a good daughter from a bad, until he has been through his own ordeal.The StormIn III, i, the Gentleman gives us an account of Lears doings which shows him as, in a way, indulging in a word form of mental representation display, enjoying the spectacle of himself suffering in the storm. The storm seems to appeal to Lear as a sort of melodramatic setting for a display of what is at this point his m machinationyr-like self-pity. snap his white hair/ Strives in his little world of man to out-storm / The to-and-fro-conflicting pencil lead and rain (III, i, 6-10). But Lear has not yet reached the truth about himself. This is weighty because it is tempting to see the storm as a sym bolic event, and Lear as man in the abstract contending with the forces of ugliness. Shakespe be makes us stem back from Lear still, and not identify with him. The real meaning of the storm lies in the thought that it was in military manly atrocious of the daughters to shut him out on such a night.Certainly Kents verbal exposition of the peculiar severity of the storm prompts one to see it as more than than merely a physical event. He has never in his lifespan seen such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder (III, ii, 46) etc., and the implication is that the storm has more than natural causes. This leads Lear to his reflection on the power of the storm to purge evil and crime Let the Great Gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder oer our heads, / Find out their enemies now (IV, ii, 49-51). His growing madness takes the form an obsessional interpretation of all ills in terms of his own personal sufferings. Shakespe are makes sure we see the point this tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else / Save what beats there (III, iv, 12-14).It is the internal tempest that matters in the drama, and the way it brings Lear to some sort of wisdom. The wildness of the elements leads him to a great approaching when he sees Edgar as elemental man. Here real truth starts to egress to him Is man no more than this? unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art (III, iv, 105-111). He sees, for the first time, beyond the surface of things, and understands the folly of snobbery and blind selfishness in kind-hearted life. His own trappings of pomp are vain, he sees himself as deluded, and Edgar as the truth.MadnessLears collapse into madness is his way to transformation. whiz of his mad notions is to imagine the mock trial of the sisters. The symbolic force of this is apparent(To Edgar) Thou, robed man of justice, take thy place.(To the Fool) And thou, his yoke fellow of equity,Bench by his side. (To Kent) You are othcommissionSit you too. (III, vi, 37-40).Here is a Christian eversion of the social order a mad beggar, a fool, and an exiled man are set up over the mighty to sit in shrewdness on them. It is a mad fancy of Lears, but it has a indistinct significance in the criticism of false sophistication that the play poses. An raw society has helped Lear to be an egotist and to do evil, as Kent said in the first scene. Now Lear is learning and regrets his own sophistication in the face of Edgar, the thing itself. What he is learning is the need for humility, and respect for others, and the brilliance of setting ones eyes on the real truths of human existence if one is to live decently and with meaning. The knowledge Lear gains is percolated through his madness.But Gloucester does not go mad. He endures everything. As he learns from Edgars lesson on the driblet, it is not mans right to choose his end. The point of that eery scene seems to be summarised at the end by Gloucesters desc ription of their relative fatesThe poove is mad how stiff is my vile senseThat I stand up, and have ingenious feelingOf my huge sorrows Better I were distractSo should my thoughts be severd from my griefs,And woes by wrong imaginations loseThe knowledge of themselves. (IV, vi, 28106)I suggest that through him we grasp the central thread, which has to do with love and suffering and sticking it out to the end Lear is spared the worst. Gloucester gets it (Mason, 1970, p.200).In Lears crazed mind all authority is in the hands of those who are unworthy. It is only their established power, their tramp and ceremonial clothes that distinguish the judges from the accused. Morality is cynically ignored. hardly selfishness rules. Let copulation thrive and the world in Lears depraved mind looks very like that presupposed by Edmunds view of nature, a sort of jungle of self-interest, power and lust.BetrayalWhen Cordelia refuses to do what her foolish father wants in the first scene she invok es the idea of the bond. I love your majesty / jibe to my bond (I, i, 92-3) And by bond she means something quite different from the gyves that he interprets it as. The question of the bonds of human relationships is central to the play why human beings fail in their bonds, as the daughters do with Lear, and Edmund does with his father is the horrific conundrum that Shakespeare cannot solve. Cordelia goes on to spell out, in an embarrassed way she had always thought it was obvious what she means by bond.It is the natural range of duties and centre that exist between children and parents. Kent too speaks of another bond, the sacred responsibilities of service. Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honourd as my King, / Lovd as my father, as my master followd (I, i, 139-141). It is the betrayal of these bonds that causes such topsy-turvyness in the moral world of King Lear, of which Jan Kott says There is neither Christian heaven, nor the heaven predicted by humanists. King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies (Kott, 1967, p.116).Edmunds speech in I, ii is plain because his thought is plain. There is no hesitation in him because there are no doubts, and no traces of decent feeling in him at all. He is utterly conscienceless. nought in him works to check the urge of ruthlessness. His closeness to the sisters is clear. His Nature, it is jolly obvious, is a different concept from that assumed in Cordelias explanation of the natural bonds of feeling and duty which underlie decent society. It is, for him, nature as expressed in the law of the jungle naked self-interest and the seeking of power. He is appalling in his plainness. The sisters are equally ready to betray normal ties. It is astonishing to hear Regans total failure to react to Lears appeals for sympathy. After all, however absurd his selfishness, he is her father. But she responds, as does Goneril, like a machine, with an icy formality of tone which is the voice of ice-cold reason.O, Sir you are old,Nature in you stands on the very vergeOf her confine you should be ruld and ledBy some discretion that discerns your stateBetter then you yourself. (II, iv, 147-151).We might be tempted to agree with Bradley that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant determine is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their children and of the children against their fathers (Bradley, 214). But the bonds are not always betrayed. A notable incident in III, vii, the scene in which Gloucester is blinded, is the intervention of the servant. He acts purely on a humane instinct of decency, knowing in his soul that such conduct as Cornwalls is not resistant in a human world. He invokes the sacred bond of service, just as Kent did to Lear Hold your hand, my lord / I have served you ever since I was a child / But better service have I never done you / Than now to bid you hold (III, vii, 71-4). The point here the infinitely blessed and optimistic point is that this man is no t a hero, but simply a decent human being. But he is ready to die in defense of a tolerable worldWorks CitedBradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London Macmillan, Second edition, 1905.Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski, London, Methuen, 2nd edition 1967.Mason, H.A., Shakespeares Tragedies of Love, London, Chatto and Windus, 1970.Shakespeare, W. The Arden Shakespeare King Lear. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London Methuen, 1980.