Fate in Shakespeare's King Lear

Fate in King Lear

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we

will." These words from Hamlet are echoed, even more pessimistically, in

Shakespeare's play, The Tragedy of King Lear where Gloucester says:

"Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their

sport". In Lear, the characters are subjected to the various tragedies of

life over and over again.

An abundance of cyclic imagery in Lear shows that good people are

abused and wronged regardless of their own noble deeds or intentions.

Strapped to a wheel of fire, humans suffer and endure, prosper and decline,

their very existence imaged as a voyage out and a return. The movement

from childhood to age and back again, the many references to fortune whose

wheel spins humans downward even as it lifts, the abundance of natural

cycles which are seen as controlling experience, even perhaps the movement

of play itself from order to chaos to restoration of order to division

again.

Throughout the text, the movements of celestial bodies are used to

account for human action and misfortune. Just as the stars in their

courses are fixed in the skies, so do the characters view their lives as

caught in a pattern they have no power to change. Lear sets the play in

motion in banishing Cordelia when he swears "by all the operation of the

orbs from whom we exist and cease to be" that his decision "shall not be

revoked". How like the scene in Julius Caesar wherein Caesar says "For I

am constant as the Northern star" Lear vows to be resolute but dies

regretting his decision at the hands of his daughters who claim love him

"more than word can wield" and are "alone felicitate" in his presence.

That Edmund disbelieves in the influence of the stars adds to the

play's recurring theme that part of our fate is our character; that we

choose our lot in life by how we choose to act. Similarly, in Lear

Gloucester's feelings predict what is to come when he says "These late

eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good..." And because of this

Gloucester begins to envision a world where "Love cools, friendship falls

off, brothers divide..." While his father misunderstands the importance

of the celestial bodies, his bastard son, Edmund denies the importance of

the movements of the heavenly bodies. He calls it "an excellent foppery"

to "make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars." (Just as in

Julius Caesar we learn that "... The fault .