False Death In Shakespeare's King Lear

‘Give order these bodies high on a stage be placed to view’ (5.2.419-20) declares Horatio and, in the staging of Hamlet, this command has already been fulfilled in front of a watching audience. In King Lear, Cordelia dies offstage but her body is brought back on as a final spectacle and, even though she never awakens, the prospect of a revival lingers to tantalize the audience; Lear crying ‘Look there, look there!’ when he thinks she might still breathe. In Shakespeare, death is ‘essential to his concept of the form and the kind of closure that he aims at’ (Kleiner 18). That is to say, plots generally drive towards a tragic conclusion of death, even if some – namely in the comedies – manage to escape a final, fatal end. False deaths are pervasive

Anti-female discourse was ‘widely available’ to Renaissance readers, as inheritors of ‘medieval misogyny’ (Wayne 155), evident in, for example, Jankyn’s ‘boke of wikked wives’ from Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (144.685). Likewise, Le Jaloux’s tirades against women, popularised by Jean de Meun’s part of The Romance of the Rose (Wayne 155), were particularly damning of “the weaker

Furthermore, the clearest manifestation of patriarchs denouncing innocent women is evident in The Winter’s Tale, where King Leontes jails his wife for being an ‘adulteress’ (2.1.693), based on the irrational assumption that she is having an affair with Polixenes because she could convince Polixenes to extend his visit when Leontes could not. This claim is as dubious as the ‘ocular proof’ (3.3.362) of the handkerchief in Othello and, in Much Ado About Nothing, the false identification of Hero being ‘wooed’ (3.3.139) by Borachio in the window, even though her face is never seen. Just like Hero, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale does not plan to fake her death; she ‘falls’ (3.2.162) in court when answering Leontes’ allegations of her infidelity and after hearing her son has died from the grief of her imprisonment. The loss of a viable male protector (her father and son are both dead, and her husband is her accuser) means that Hermione’s pretence of death becomes necessary as the only means of escaping a system of justice heavily weighted against