Katarzyna Barbara Parys

Exam question

The story of King Lear takes place is an archaic, pre-Christian, barbarian world.
A state and its order are weak and depends on drives. The order is susceptible to king’s
passions; it depends on a current emotional state of the king, without any respect to
what can be called western-european Christian morality of good and bad. The king is
omnipotent even with his own daughters. He orders to be loved and the way in which
this love must be shown. When misfortune, he runs amok. Resignation, forgiving or
mercy are unknown elements in this wild world. Shakespeare wanted to show the world
before conscience, governed by drives as a source of legislation (Ulrich 1895: 3).
Barbarian times were believed as the kingdom of wild passions and of a lack of what we
understand today as wester reason, rationality. The quote: “Lear is frightened of going
mad, because madness is the passport to self-knowledge, self-knowledge being
something denied to him all his life.” Matches perfectly with characteristic of the
mysterious time in which the story takes place. Self-knowledge was denied to him,
because he had to be the strongest in order to keep the power. The wild force is not
compatible with self-knowledge. He wants to believe his situation is as he wants it to
be. He is not interested into investigating someone´s intentions. His power is guaranteed
by his soldiers. When he gets older, he cannot govern anymore, because he is not the
strongest one. Everything has to follow social, political rules of this kingdom and the
wisdom of the older is not a value. In this world. there is no room for self-knowledge.

At the beginning of the play King Lear lacks self-knowledge. He needs to hear
from his daughters whether they love him, or not. He needs to ask the question and hear
the direct answer. We can infer from that that he is unable do judge by their actions how
are their feelings towards him. He bases his judgement on the beautiful worlds he hears.
King Lear is sure that Cordelia does not love him only because she says that: “I love
your Majesty According to my bond; no more nor less” (Shakespeare 1997). The King
Lear rejects the ones that love him for real, Cordelia and Kent, who suggests that it is
not right to send Cordelia away. He loves Goneril and Regan because they told him
things he wanted to hear. He ignores the fact that they could offer him mere worlds and
not actions. He was unable to see that they did not care about him. Older daughters used
his lacks self-knowledge and an impossibility to read someone’s intentions. He could
trust only the worlds he wanted to hear.
 He lacks self-knowledge also in a sense that he sees himself only as a king. His
role in legal system, his persona, makes him forget about himself as a human being, as a
loving father of his daughters. He cannot see himself outside the role of the king. The
relationship he has with his daughters of king-daughters and not of father-daughters.

King Lear starts to change while gradually discovering that Goneril and Regan
did not love him. As he gave them power, he become useless and his daughters started
to show their real intentions. As Lear was discovering that and understanding his
mistake, hi started acting crazy, or at least he was seen as crazy by other charactes.
Moreover, this madness was a sign of grooving self-knowledge that culminated in the
final scene. He gained the self-knowledge by his own mistakes. He started to learn
about himself and about the human nature when his daughters deceived him.

Political effects of his lack of self-knowledge was the misfortune for his
kingdom. The state was governed by his deceiving daughters and their husbands. By the
lack of self-knowledge, he gave the power to Goneril and Regan while disinheriting
Cordelia, the only daughter that loves him for real and does not want to participate in
the contest of the most fake loving words towards the father (scene 1). King Lear
abandoned the kingdom. His country was governed poorly and began to decline.
Cordelia and her husband the king of France wanted to regain Britain and make it great
again, what caused a war. Thus, political effects of Lear´s lack of self-knowledge was
the decline of this country and general misfortune.

At the end of the play we can see that in King Lear’s madness is his way to gain
self-knowledge. “Reason is madness”: only in madness you can see things as they are,
because you are not trying to deceive yourself. In the state of madness, we can,
paradoxically, reach rational view the situation. In madness there is no room for self-
deceiving. Lear is not seeing anymore the world the way he wanted to see it. He faces
the truth. Cordelia, the daughter he thought that did not love him, loved him for real,
and the ones that only declared love, were the ones that did not love him.

When Cordelia dies, Lear changes his perspective from the official perspective
of the king and gains self-knowledge of his human condition of father. He abandoned
the institution in order to be in touch with this family self. He abandons legal person in
order to suffer the death of his daughter at oikos level. The dramatic final scene shows
that, in the end, the only thing that actually matters is that he finally understands who
was the one on his side, and the monologue is a great testimony of his self-knowledge.

Bibliography:

1. Shakespeare, William (1997), The Tragedy of King Lear. Project Gutenberg.

2. Ulrich, Leon ([1895]), “Wstęp”, in: Król Lear. Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska.