As the audience prepares for the death of King Lear, as they bite their nails during the next sword fight between the two estranged brothers, he notices that amidst all this royal drama, a silly cat a fight has developed between Regan and Goneril. We can trace it all back to the beginning. After Goneril states that she loves her father "more than words can express" (33), a phrasing that can never be surpassed, Regan professes that her sister "is too short." (34) They come together when it suits them and for the plot. They are also willing to throw their father to the winds, when he demands his humanity. And when each sees the opportunity to satisfy their feminine urges, each is willing to do anything - poison or stab the other - to win the prize. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Indeed, Regan and Goneril are not characters at all. Shakespeare sketches them as easily as the obsequious servant Oswald, imbuing them with all the motives, nuances, passions that would suit a tigress or a two-year-old child. They are also not really different from each other. By the end of the play, only Shakespeare scholars could tell you who claimed Edmund first, who stabbed whom, or who died when. The reason is of course that it doesn't change anything in the room. They are interchangeable. They are bad sisters, bad wives, bad daughters. And that's it. Compare them to the other evil force in the play, Edmund. Regan and Goneril essentially perform the same function as him: to deceive the father for their benefit, to the detriment of his sanity and his life. Edmond, however, offers us all the complexity of a developed character. When we meet him, he reveals to us what bothers him. He asks the sky: “Why is this vile? (44) He later shows the workings of a philosophical mind when he tells us that he does not believe in any "heavenly constraint" (47) and therefore "he should have been what he is." We know exactly why he resents his brother, exactly the nature of his drive for power, exactly why he has so much faith in him. We love him even against our will. He is what Regan and Goneril should be if Shakespeare had wanted to bring them to life. The third sister is no more real than her elders. She is good, pure and simple. Again, we see this in the first scene of the play, as are its opening lines: “What should Cordelia say? Love and shut up. » (33) This fairy tale princess is a clear contrast to her evil “fat-tongued” sisters. Then, when the villains swing their father back and forth, moving the story forward, Cordelia is in France, as absent as ideals are in this murky milieu of the play. When she returns, she is at once the heroine, the friend and the martyr. When Lear calls her a “soul in happiness” (146), it is both a truism and a premonition. She is an angel on stage and a fallen angel in death. In short, she's completely unambiguous, completely single-minded, and, as the characters say, uninteresting. Edgar, his goodness counterpart, has so much personality that he is forced to split himself in two. He is not supernatural, like Cordelia. Although he too is banished from his father, he does not disappear into a distant land. Instead, we follow him in his struggle, in his beggar's clothes. We feel his agony when he realizes his father is blind. We let him guide us as he led his father to the confines of reality in the world of metatheatre. We wonder why he keeps his identitysecret. We see him get lost in his invented character. We learn from what he learns, we are impressed by what impresses him. He's a real human being, perhaps even more of an audience member than a character in a play. He is unpredictable. He is the opposite of Cordelia in every way except that they are both on the same team. The good son and the bad son are flesh and blood. The good girl and the bad girls are quick strokes of the pen. This makes a dichotomy between plot and subplot, making Lear's tragedy more mythical and grander than Gloucester's. But more importantly, it creates a barrier between the sexes: the men in the play think, struggle, and suffer, while the women bicker and die. Certainly, this is an oversimplification, but it is an oversimplification that Shakespeare invites the audience into. We are never once asked to examine the motivations or ideas of women; they simply are. They direct the plot like guideposts. It is the men who interest us. All of this begs the question: what about Lear's wife? What about Gloucester's wife and lover? They are both remarkably dead and gone. If they had been in the room, they would surely have moderated their partner's madness, restricting, in some sense, their ability to embody their characters. But we don't even mention their names. Lear only refers directly to his wife once, when he tells Regan that he would "separate me from your mother's tomb, burying an adulterous woman" (84) if she had not been happy to have him see him arrive at his door. What Lear is implying here is that none of his daughters would refuse him. And this idea implicitly implies that his wife, or her lover, is responsible for Regan's actions. Here we see that Lear, at least at the beginning of the play, believes that destiny is determined in part by the relationship between mother and father. Gloucester, for his part, briefly references his children's mothers at the beginning, comparing his two children. Of course, over the course of the play, the “vile” turns out to be “vile,” the “legitimate” turns out to be good. It is logical to think that Gloucester comes to believe what Lear implied earlier when he realizes that "Edgar has been mistreated." (116) He even pleads, “Kind gods, forgive me for this,” the word “kind” implying that the gods rule rationally, which itself implies that “low” is low. If the women are either non-existent, or plot-focused, or both. , then it is only a very small leap to say that all the determinants - and by this we mean the inevitable movements of the play and, consequently, of life - are feminine in nature. Lear does not have the power to change what Regan and Goneril are, any more than he can persuade Cordelia to abandon her virtues and lie. These elements are the "givens" of the play, as are the positions of Edgar and Edmund in relation to each other, which were determined long ago by the status of their mothers. To risk further abstraction, Fortune is herself a woman, and yet another cause of inevitable suffering. Nature is also called “goddess”. Moreover, the number of sisters in the play is hardly arbitrary: in this pagan world, it is impossible not to compare them to the three Fates, who hold in their hands the strings of the lives of all the other characters. Isn't leaving Lear to the wind a way of cutting his thread? If "man's life is as cheap as that of an animal" (90) when he only has what "nature requires", have not Regan and Goneril stripped Lear of his man's life by leaving him with only the clothes he wears?Beyond this idea of ​​woman as cause, looms one of Shakespeare's favorite subjects, sex. These two ideas are brilliantly brought together by Edmund in the monologue where he rebels against conventions. He mocks those who believe that we are what we are because of a “divine nudge”. (48), the expression “push” bringing to mind this act of human drama when we “push”. He then goes on to say that it makes no difference when his father "aggregated" with his mother. We thus see that to act against what seems to be a divine law is to act against the determination of Sex. The Fool jokes along the same lines. One of his riddles ends with the parable: “Leave your drink and your whore, / And stay in a door, / And you will have more / Than two dozen for a score. (55) Since a score is by definition composed of two series of ten, it follows that it is impossible to escape from drinking and fucking. We have no choice, according to the madman, but to copulate. In another parable, the Fool teaches that when "whores and whores build churches... / feet will be used to go there." (97) Since “going” is always done with the feet, this means that whores build churches. Whores, the symbol of sex, are metaphorically responsible for constructing the buildings in which we admit our humility in the face of a greater power, in which we surrender our will to an Other. Furthermore, the Fool had previously called Fortune a “disobedient whore”. (81) We see, according to the Fool, how sex reigns over the cosmos. In the same vein, Gonerille attributes the bad behavior of Lear's knights to "Epicureanism and lust", which make his palace "like a brothel". (59) She uses this as an excuse to shoot down Lear's "train", causing Lear to seek refuge in his other daughter's house. We could therefore say that lust is the primary cause of Lear's madness, since it is apparently lust that must separate Lear from his beloved knights, and lust that separates Lear from his eldest daughter. When Edgar invents a folly, he attributes it to part of lust too. He says he "served the lust of [his] mistress's heart and committed the act of darkness with her." (102) He advises Lear not to let “the crunch of shoes nor the rustle of silks” take over his “heart” because it has its own invented character. The fact that Edgar imagines lust as one of the causes, if not the main one, of his madness is particularly interesting and relevant because there is an obvious parallel between Edgar and Shakespeare throughout. Edgar, for example, relates the scene at the cliffs of Dover to his father in the same way that Shakespeare recounts the dialogue of that scene. Edgar also creates a completely fictional character in Tom, just as Shakespeare created a whole series of characters. And just as Shakespeare made lust the prime mover behind the scenes, so did Edgar. Until now, “woman” has led to “sex” and “sex” to “lust,” without any unifying idea. This idea must be fertility. Without fertility, there can be no life. Without life there can be no King Lear. Fertility is the great prerequisite. If we have the ability to neutralize natural forces, then we can avoid “mess,” as Edgar advises. If we fail to do this, as the end of the play seems to suggest (taking the popular, modern, negative reading), then this precondition is as good as fate. It is this wheel that turns; evil “races”. (45). It is the cycle of years. A classic symbol of fertility is the egg, where the power of life is stored. In Lear the egg is mentioned twice. The Fool mocks Lear for having.