Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide.
In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bonds crack’d, … The King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child.
We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (Act I, Scene II, L. 111) Harold’s Skulsky posits in his work, King Lear and the Meaning of Chaos, that “Lear shatters such smiling and harmonious consort with cacophony and discord.
It is a dance of death and devils, in which the dominant repeated images are of disease and decease, … animality and disorder”.
What can be added to that stance is that chaos and confusion unfold from the moment that power moves from man’s rule to women’s dominion. Evil, chaos and disorder are even personified and gendered female in the tragedy. The disorder of nature, rule, relationships, health and religion equate to female sway and discordance of the spheres. The harmony of the spheres is broken.
King Lear the patriarchal head of England has the position of king, ruler – a divinely ordained responsibility.The most important significance of Lear’s playlet is the way in which it ensures continued disorder through the precedent it establishes,” (Some Facets of King Lear pg. 29) and that disorder remains in force through female rule and representation. When he decides to divest himself of authority, disharmony, discord and moral depravity invade and pervade the land.
The government and natures go awry. The fall and the decline of Lear’s kingdom are attributed to female interference in administration therefore chaos and evil are feminised. Sexual disorder and sexual immorality in Lear are more ascribed to the female.The whore and the adulteress are dissolute women given to desire and lust – objectionable qualities in women.
At Gloucester’s castle, the “bastard Edmund” (Act I, Scene II, L. 17) denounces himself and proudly boasts that his mother was a whore who gives birth to a deviant, bastard child. Goneril refuses to accommodateLear’s one hundred knights for she fears that the palace be degraded to a “brothel”(Act I, Scene IV,L. 237.
This opinion is loaded with irony since she prostitutes herself for power and later for her paramour, Edmund. The palace is already tainted with whoredom.Blind Fortune who curses and dooms the downtrodden at her very caprice is called “that arrant whore who ne’er turns the key to the poor”(Act II, Scene IV,L. 57).
Likewise Cordelia calls blind Fortune “False Fortune” (Act V, Scene VI, L. 6) which signifies that she is an adulteress who is unfaithful to her conjugal pledge. Fortune is false to the oppressed subjects of England by endowing propitious lots to the undeserving and unfavorable lots to the good. Lady Justice or simply Justice is the Roman goddess of Justice.
She is the embodiment of justice, fairness, and legal order.In Lear, Justice has degenerated into “false justicer”(Act III, Scene IV, L. 56). This retrogressive standard of justice means that in England, the principles of fairness, virtue, morality and reason no longer rule.
The transition from order to disorder is illustrated by the change of rule from Lady Justice to False Justicer. False Justicer has sexual implications for when a woman is false, she is unfaithful to her husband and disloyal to her marital vows. So False Justicer is an adulteress who pollutes the land with disorder by issuing false judgments.Lear is so repulsed by the loathsome attitude of his daughters that he wishes to divorce his dead wife “sepulchring an adultress” (Act II, Scene IV, L.
139). Critic Kenneth Muir who authored The Tragic Sequence asserts that “evil is the most powerful dynamic force of the play”. In Lear, allusions to devils, evil spirits and devil worship are all represented as female. Hecate is the goddess of the wilderness, childbirth, sorcery and witchcraft.
The dark meaning attached to the goddess implies that during the period of Goneril’s and Regan’s rule, she reigns also making the reign an ominous trinity of chaotic rulers over England.Mahu is a creator goddess who is associated with the sun and the moon. This goddess has an incestuous relationship with her brother which condemns her before the eyes of the British Renaissance society whose ideals and virtues bespeak a very strong Christian tradition. Lear calls his daughters “unnatural hags” (Act II, Scene IV, L.
305) or witches. Albany denounces Goneril: “See thyself, devil! Proper deformity seems not in the fiend/ So horrid as in woman/ Beneath is all the fiend’s/ There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit;/burning, scalding, stench, consumption”. (Act IV, Scene IV, L. 40-144) Evil is cloaked in the female form.
In Lear, Duke of Albany scornfully tells his wife that “a woman’s shape doth shield thee”. (Act IV, Scene II, L. 75) Femininity covers the demonic duo from sooner death at the hands of the men. Shakespeare often alludes to the female genitalia as hell where “there’s darkness, the sulphurous pit and burning, scalding, stench (and) consumption,” where all the fiends or devils reside.
This evil depiction of female evil and perversity runs in tandem with female disorder since England is being controlled by women and likewise, all the subjects undergo hellish experiences.Another reason for the comparison of hell and the female sexual organs is the overwhelming, infernal burning of the female passions. Albany denounces his wife as a devil whose proper deformity is even worse than that of the devil or fiend. Goneril and Regan both burn in passion in hot pursuit of Edmund and in the end, they delude themselves and tragically self-destruct.
Female disorder is also animalized in the tragedy of Lear. Lear’s daughters are called “she-foxes,” “tigers,” “bitches,” “she-pelicans” and “snakes”.These animal images connote the same qualities that Lear’s evil daughters embody: savagery, cruelty without reason, prompted solely by instinct. All of these carnivorous animals also prey on innocent creatures and have an insatiable thirst for blood.
These female images are symbolic of the desperation of evil and the general dehumanization of these women. In Lear, Mother Nature or the goddess Nature goes amiss. She bears sway over fertility, fecundity and the elements of nature. The laws of nature are broken and there is a clear violation of the order of nature and the elements.
The references to solar and lunar eclipses by Gloucester are signs of ill omen. Chaotic, vehement, intense storms and wind gales point to the confusion of Nature. Mother Nature breeds further discord among the characters of King Lear for Edmund is a “natural boy”(Act II, Scene I, L. 90).
He is illegitimate, base and bastard child while his brother is the legitimate son of Gloucester endowed with all its primogenital rights and privileges. The blame for natural children naturally falls to the woman. One can deduce that Edmund’s actions are only a corollary of the actions of a deviant of the prescribed order, a freak of nature.The bastard son of Nature, Edmund, ravages his own family and the royal one as well.
He rends the bonds of filial relationships, marital relationships and builds an erotic love triangle. He ruins two sisters, Goneril and Regan. He ruins, Gloucester and Edgar and he tampers with the conjugal relationships of his paramours, Goneril and Regan. King Lear’s doctor diagnoses Lear’s distemper as “abused nature” (Act IV, Scene VII, L.
18)as he even begins to suffer from insomnia. Sickness, disease and health disorders are portrayed to us as female in Lear. King Lear frequently makes reference to the ague.He states that he is not “ague-proof” (Act IV, Scene IV, L.
119) meaning that he is not without short-coming, fallibility or fault. The ague or malaria is actually a fever spread by the female anopheles mosquito most common in Lear’s day and so it is a female inflicted disease used to illustrate the moral ills of man. Lear also complains of another female disease “hysterica passio”(Act II, Scene IV, L. 62) or hysteria.
This condition, peculiar to women, is caused by disturbances of the uterus where there is irregular circulation of blood from the uterus to the brain.This feminized disorder is symptomatic of the general malady of the queen-dom in the hands of the evil females. Even Goneril and Regan, Lear’s daughters are called by Lear, “a disease in my flesh,” “a boil,” “a plague sore,” or “an embossed carbuncle”. Those ill-dispositions only reveal in a plainer light that the female figure runs contrary to the organization and the stability of society.
The madness of King Lear goes in sync with the declining sanity of the power-drunk women and their infirm minds while their father’s mental health retrogresses to a point where he is as a raving and petulant child.In the beginning of the chapter of King Lear the duplicitous daughters are grateful and loyal to their father but after receiving their portion of the kingdom they progressively are crueler, deadlier and sicker in their vices. Language is important in Lear in the articulation of feeling, motive and intent showing us the loftiness of language and its degradation through chaos. The style of conversation for Goneril and Regan in the tragedy of King Lear move from exaggerated, unctuous, inflated, toady language in the initial stages to dictatorial, piercing, abrasive, rude and hurtful speeches in the middle and end of the play.
On the other hand, Lear’s language most notably lapses from being kingly, majestic, clear and imperious to being more servile, incoherent, nonsensical and puerile. Language is only a reflection of a character’s inward condition. The intense rage of King Lear is conveyed through his storm speech “blow winds”and “howl, howl, howl ..
. “(Act IV, Scene III, L. 301) and upon the death of Cordelia. He becomes a raving lunatick.
At the same time, in Lear many characters also use many double-entendres in their speeches where one meaning is obvious and another is masked.Also, beautiful and poetic style are only an embellishment of the underlying ugliness of character. These practiced subtleties and nuances tell of equivocation and deception which lead inevitable to misunderstandings and chaos. Relationships in Lear, revolve around disordered females which engender dysfunctional relationships.
Cordelia acts out of character by not proclaiming in lofty terms her love for her father before his honoured guests and subjects at first and further continues the tradition of disorder and chaos so prevalent in King Lear.Goneril and Regan perpetuate the trend of disarray by breaking all filial ties and the paternal bond with their father. They shut their hearts to all human compassion, love and mercy. The power and love triangle existing amongst Goneril, Regan and Edmund emphasizes the unhealthy alliances: adultery, infidelity and fornication.
The critic Alan Hobson, author of Full Circle says that “An image of the Fall is an invocation of Chaos more terrible than Macbeth’s”.Like Pandora and Eve who are the catalysts who allow evil and chaos to enter the world, Goneril and Regan are the agents by whose acts chaos and evil are unleashed and distorts the order and proper functioning of the kingdom. The entrance of sin in the world comes about through woman’s indulgence of appetite and her usurpation of the traditional dominant male role. Just as Eve uses her feminine wiles like the serpent to seduce Adam into eating what is forbidden, Goneril and Regan use their manipulative language and power to control King Lear, Oswald, Edmund and their emasculated husbands the Duke of Albany and Duke of Cornwall.
Chaos is clothed in the garb of the woman in Lear. She is characterized as a whore, devil, animal, disease, and language. Female disorder accentuates the dissolution of the kingdom while in the hands of the women. England is a “gor’d state”(Act.
V, Scene III, L. 380). Only through the deaths of the women of King Lear that the state is able to heal her wounds and where order is able to be reestablished and stabilized. Debased whores and adulteresses personify chaos and disorganization.
Devils and images bespeaking disorder are metaphors for the character qualities of women who go counter to the demands of nature.Animals gendered feminine manifest the lack of humanity and of the softer qualities expected in the woman. Sickness is precipitated by the actions of females whose victims suffer. Deranged senses and corrupted hearts verbalize the state of pandemonium in Lear.
Relationships and rapports involving corrupt females promote anarchy and ultimately end in failure. The only way that order is reinstituted in the realm of King Lear is Kent and Edgar assuming administrative duties to set in order the discomposed domain.
