In most of Shakespeare's King Lear, the hero is mad; otherwise, he is wrong. In his magnificent speech in V.iii.8-26, Lear displays a new and optimistic vision of his future with Cordelia moments before Edmund orders her death. Lear's discovery of his own humanity and weakness in the face of the storm brought him closer to Cordelia and freed him from his pride; having lost his kingdom, two of his daughters and much of his sanity, he believes that nothing can harm him, because he has nothing left to lose. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Lear actually has one thing, and he loses it: Cordelia. Lear can't wait to go to prison; he sees it as a refuge, where he and his daughter will be safe. “Come, let us go to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds in the cage” (V.iii.8-9), he tells her. A “cage” was also used to refer to a prison for petty criminals, adding to the relevance of Lear’s simile. Caged birds often signify the imprisonment of a free spirit, but Lear transforms them into an image of beauty and joy, just as he transforms the gloomy prospect of prison into a glorious future. Such reversals are the order of the play; not only is the societal order upended, with a king frozen in the storm and a father submissive to his children, but the very notions of good and evil are reversed as Gloucester becomes a traitor and Edmund a noble lord. Lear's offer to "kneel and ask [Cordelia's] pardon" when she "asks his blessing" (V.iii.10-11) contains many such changes: a father kneels in front of his daughter, a king in front of a subject. , a lord to a supplicant. The most significant distortion, however, lies in Lear's own personality. When Cordelia suggests that they “see these daughters and these sisters” (V.iii.7), Lear insists: “No, no, no, no” (V.iii.8), the repetition and extra-metrality emphasizing his desire. being with Cordelia and avoiding her sisters. In Ii, Lear, preferring his other daughters, wanted her to “avoid [his] sight” (Ii125), but now she is the only thing he wants to see. This insight into Cordelia's love is the direct result of another, more fundamental personality change. “Ask him for forgiveness? / Do you notice how this house is becoming?” (II.ii.341-2) Lear asked when he felt like a king, scoffing at the idea of ​​kneeling before Regan. Lear was not a terribly kind person then, as his treatment of Kent and Cordelia in II shows, but once he is humiliated by his miseries, Lear is not ashamed to treat Cordelia as an equal and d accept your true love instead of feigned affection. of his sisters that he had longed for earlier. Just as his acceptance of Cordelia marks a radical change in point of view, so does Lear's rejection of his sisters. He denies not only them, but the entire court; he envisions “laughing at the golden butterflies” (V.iii.13), an expression that evokes joy and wonder. Lear is happy enough to forget his anger even toward his objects of disgust, regarding them as senseless playthings. He and Cordelia “will hear poor rascals / talking about court news; and [they] will speak with them also” (V.iii.13-4). The extreme simplicity of Lear's diction and syntax in this speech expresses his childish detachment, as does the joyful and condescending paradox of the "poor rascals" of the court. Likewise, the string of monosyllables and polysyndetones in Lear's plans to "live / And pray, and sing, and tell old stories, and laugh" (V.iii.12-13) emphasizes the simplicity of the life heconsider. The only connection Lear will retain with the court will be for its amusement; he acquired the ability to laugh at himself. However, Lear cannot escape certain aspects of court life. He says that he will discuss with the courtiers "who loses and who wins, who is in, who is out" (V.iii.15), politics being part of what he renounces. But Lear cannot avoid the vagaries of fate which characterize court life; he has no king or nobles to court for favors now, but he does have the gods. Whether the gods in King Lear actually exist is in this regard a moot point, but the characters refer to the gods and fortune as shaping fate, punishing the wicked, or simply punishing the good through malice; what is clear is that these people live in a world of unstable fortunes, both inside and outside the courtroom. Lear saw the arbitrary and unjust nature of human authority in IV.vi, where he asks Gloucester "see how your justice deals with your simple thief [...] tinker, what is justice, what is the thief? (IV.vi.147-8), but he never seems to see fortune as an entirely external and omnipotent force. This alone sets him apart from most characters and places him in unlikely company with Regan, Goneril, and Cornwall. What differentiates his vision of fortune from theirs is that he has one; the thought of outside interference never enters the minds of these villains. Lear sees this presence, but he interprets it as the result of human actions. He wants to “exhaust/In a walled prison, packs and groups of greats/Those who ebb and flow near the moon” (V.iii.16-18), but he does not think that the influence of the moon can break. through the walls. The most succinct explanation of this view is found in what appears to be the beginning of Lear's madness. Seeing Edgar disguised as poor Tom, Lear exclaims: [...] Nothing could have subjected nature to such baseness if not her wicked daughters. Is it fashion that rejected fathers have so little pity for their flesh? the flesh begat these pelican girls. (III.iv.69-74) Lear views the wrongs he suffers at the hands of Regan and Goneril as the result of his own sexual misdeeds or his folly in abandoning the kingdom, but despite all his self-pity , he never considers himself an innocent victim. After his rebirth as a self-proclaimed wise man, once the storm has passed, he feels he has paid for everything he could have done, deciding “they can't touch me for inventing; I am the king himself” (IV.vi.83). -4).This renunciation of the vagaries of destiny includes Lear's identification with those who are beyond destiny. He and Cordelia will “assume the mystery of things/As if they were spies of the gods” (V.iii.16-17), implying that they literally have special eyesight. Lear's statement that "upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The gods themselves cast incense" (V.iii.20-1) adds the sense of smell, thus culminating the use of sight to describe the erroneous seeing and smelling of the world for the purposes of intuition and smell. truth. Although King Lear is a pagan play, the context of the first quotation prompts the reader and listener to take the word "mystery" in a Christian sense. This, coupled with Lear's request for forgiveness, the idea of ​​"sacrifices" which anticipates Cordelia's sacrifice, and the biblical reference to Samson a few lines later, almost suggests that Lear has stumbled upon a possible answer to the question. evil. The concept of such isolated and strong Christian imagery in a room with Roman gods may seem strange, but from a broader perspective it makes complete sense. King Lear is a play about evil,among other things, and about why the world is unfair. Setting such a play in pre-Christian England avoids putting the author in theological or political trouble (besides, imagine writing such a play after the Act of Abuses of 1606, prohibiting blasphemy on stage), but the would normally prevent showing a Christian perspective. on evil. Without this speech from Lear and the death of Cordelia, it is too easy to view King Lear as only referring to a world without the guiding hand of the true God. These few lines and the shocking and incomprehensible ending suggest that King Lear's problems are not solved by Christian charity. Yet for Lear, at this point, there are no more problems. He refuses to let Cordelia cry, telling her to "wipe your eyes" (V.iii.23), that there is nothing to fear, echoing his sentiment from IV.vii.72. He also insists that "he who separates us must bring a brand from heaven / And set us on fire then like foxes" (V.iii.22-3), implying that they will be inseparable like the foxes from whom Samson tied the tails together and attached firebrands to burn the crops of the Philistines; he also unconsciously anticipates their shared destruction. The allusion eases the transition to the statement that "the good years will devour them, flesh and flesh, / Before they make us cry!" / We will first see them die of hunger” (V.iii.23-6). There may be a pun on "fallen" in the sense of "evil", emphasizing Lear's view that the "good years" will prevail. no, of course. It does not take long for Lear to realize the unrealistic nature of his claims. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And you, no breath at all? » ) he asks his daughter. This is the supreme injustice of the play; it entirely undermines Albany's assertion that "all friends shall taste the wages of their virtue" (V.iii.301-2), made a few moments earlier; with any notion of divine justice or benevolent gods throwing incense on sacrifices, unless that sacrifice is the list of beasts of Cordelia herself, to which the villains of the play are so often compared, elevates the injustice at a higher level; may be dead, but evil is not, and although order has been restored to the kingdom, the universe is no better off, Cordelia herself, "[n't] a] no, no, no life![...she will come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never” (V.iii.306-7), leaving Lear to express the dominant nihilistic theme of the play in a stream of negatives that echo those of the play's beginning Edmund's dying turnaround seemed like a temporizing impulse to do good at his end now that good has prevailed, but it came to nothing. . Death, without any allusion to heaven or rebirth, has won; if "there is life in it!" hers now. The astonishing beauty and simplicity of Lear's grief is interrupted by a prosaic note, more stagecraft than poetry: "Please undo this button" (V.iii.308). , but it is a direction on which a lot of ink has been spilled. Perhaps Lear is unable to breathe, overwhelmed by grief, or perhaps he wants to help Cordelia breathe; the latter would explain his "lips" (V.iii.309), because he thinks that Cordelia is alive and breathing, and so dies in the same joyous illusion as V.iii.8-26. Peter Brook and other directors took this concept a step further by having Lear show Cordelia's spirit, hovering somewhere in the air. But this explanation is by no means the only valid one. Lear clearly sees something.