Examples Of Dementia In King Lear

Insanity occupies an essential place in Shakespeare’s play, and is associated with both disorder and hidden wisdom. As King Lear goes mad due to dementia, the turmoil in his mind mirrors the chaos that has descended upon his kingdom. He initiates the unnatural sequence of events when he proclaims that he desires: “To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburthened crawl towards death” (1.1.41-43). At the same time, Lear’s dementia provides him with important wisdom by reducing him to his bare humanity and stripped him of all royal pretensions.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear is challenged by two bodies: the celestial body which presents him as a ruler and is connected to god, and the

terrestrial body which presents Lear as a father figure. As a man of enormous power, status, wealth, responsibility, and social complexity, Lear faces a terrible isolation from his family and nature itself, thus he suffers from the stripping of his entire identity and goes mad as a result. From his mistreatment, Lear stated, “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age, wretched in both. / … these daughters’ hearts / Against their father [made me a] fool” (2.4.271-274). We are able to witness a total transformation from a magnificence human being to total despair that was rendered with emotional intensity. This intensity is heightened by the fact that Lear's circumstances is emphasised throughout the play by the similar experiences of the Duke of Gloucester.
Lear himself is very powerfully aware of his importance. He intends to transfer the power of his throne onto his children, and spend the rest of his life free of the responsibilities which come with the position of a king. But in surrendering his birthright position, Lear has no intention of ceasing the treatment of being a king. He is unwilling to alter his identity when he claimed that “Only [I] shall retain/ The name, and all the additions to a king” (1.1.137-138). His decision to divide the kingdom is a sign of foolishness and his interior motive was to reinforce his powerful ego. The real cause of the sequence of events which leads ultimately to Lear's death is his inability to tolerate any view of him. The extraordinary speed and violence of his response from the banishment of Kent and Cordelia reveals to us that Lear’s state of mind is extremely abnormal. His mind is comprised of an enormously powerful ego which simply cannot accept any opinions on his sense of how he should be treated. He simply cannot hear or see anything which does not fit his own conception of himself. The strength of this solitary ego manifests itself in the bizarrely controlling and brutal images with which Lear expresses his anger at Cordelia's refusal to flatter him: “The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom / Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved, / As thou my sometime daughter” (1.1.118-122). He essentially explodes emotionally when any form of challenge manifests itself as a result of his dementia. Although Lear recovers briefly, he becomes insane again in the moment before his death when he realized that “[Cordelia is] gone for ever” (5.3.272).
The central struggle in King Lear (other than Lear's havoc mind) is between people who see their relationship with Lear, and people with ulterior motives. Those who seek to assist Lear and strive to fight the forces that opposes him, such as: Kent, Cordelia, the Fool, Edgar, Gloucester, and Albany, are motivated principally by a traditional sense of love, respect, and allegiance (“King Lear”). The opposing group who serve primarily to themselves is largely determined by their desire to use people for their own self-advancement, such as: Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, Edmund, and Oswald. For these characters, traditional notions of bonds are illusions. Bonds are outdated conventions that stand in the way of their individual desire for power. Thus, they are ready to violate established bonds in order to pursue their own plans (“King Lear”). Lear's hundred knights later become an issue as the play progress. The hundred knights are not at all necessary to Lear's daily routine and comforts, but they are essential to his sense of identity as the leader, the person to whom others defer and give allegiance. They represent the image of a ruler that Lear desperately tries to maintain. Regan and Goneril quickly resent Lear's huge retinue and sense that their father has no perception of the reality.
Due to many opposing forces who are trying to usurp his power, Lear refuses to compromise when faced with circumstances that do not support his vision of himself. He rejects the advises that the Fool has given, he resists his own growing awareness that he might have made a mistake, and he will not adjust his desires to fit what his daughters are prepared to do for him. This characteristic portrays King Lear as a passionately egocentric and unsympathetic character, but what redeems him is the quality of his passion and his willingness to suffer. King Lear has been capable of folly and eventually come to realize his limitations, but he also gains a new recognition of his strength.
Lear discovered the truth in his madness and is able to differentiate the meaning of “tattered clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all.

Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtles breaks;/ Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it” (4.6.166-169). By wearing ornate clothing one is capable of masking his evilness, but those whom exposes oneself to nakedness reveals the truth and integrity. As he struggles in the raging storm, he imposes his sense on the elements of nature by seeking justice from the gods: “Let the great gods, / That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads, / Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch, / That hast within thee undivulgéd crimes, / Unwhipped of justice” (3.2.49-53). There is more to Lear's passion than his demand for justice in this passage however. He is also fighting a war against himself and against the growing awareness that he might be a sinner. Lear has given some brief signs that a sense of his own liability is growing within when he stated "I did [Cordelia] wrong" (1.5.25), in response to his banishment of his lovable daughter. In this regard, Lear also stops thinking about himself and expresses genuine feeling for the sufferings of others by speaking of them

as,
Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall our houseless heads and unfed sides,
You looped and windowed raggedness, defend you.
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this!

(3.4.28-33).

The sight of Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, also drives Lear beyond any sense of sanity. This sight causes Lear to tear off his clothes and implied that “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (3.4.109-110). The act of tearing off his clothes is the forcible rejection of the civilized life which gives him a sense of who and where he belongs. It signifies Lear's inevitable surrender to the torment in his mind which has desperately been seeking for some reassurance (“SparkNotes”). Having found none, he acknowledges the absurdity of the world by joining it.

Lear has finally discovered his capacity to love and to recognize in that bond the most important element of life. He begs for forgiveness and has come to terms of humiliation. Thus, when he and Cordelia are captured and sent off to prison, he accepts his fate because being with Cordelia is far more important than any justice or injustice in the world. This indicate a transformed understanding within Lear and the awareness of new priorities which place human love above the meaningless political world that he has been so obsessed with. As Lear dies, Kent's comment salutes Lear's death as something to be welcomed: Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer” (5.3.314-317). In truth, Lear made the decision to go mad in order to retain control over his own mind. Since he feels

as if the world has gone insane and Lear always responds instantly to his most powerful feelings, he commits himself to the full isolation of insanity. This insanity, however, contains hidden wisdom that sparked a new recognition to his personality.