Filial Love And Love In Shakespeare's King Lear

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Love Has Roots
For a normal person, the first people they love are their parents. Why do they love their parents? Out of duty or because they learn to and give it freely? In King Lear there are many paternal/filial relationships, and each filial counterpart has a prevalent characteristic that symbolizes a correlative relationship with their father. Filial love is a duty and something that is freely given. There is a balance between the two. First, the love should come from the obligation to love a family member, and then once that is fulfilled there should be a love that grows out of more than just a sense of duty. The character Cordelia shows what proper love for a father should look like: She is virtuous and knows her place, while the other
To have true filial love, there has to be both a sense of duty and a love that stems from loving the character and more.
Cordelia loves Lear because it was her duty, but the love is obviously rooted in more. She shows it through her respect for her father. When Lear is dividing his kingdom into sectors for his daughters inheritances, he has them each tell them how much they love him. His two daughters, Goneril and Regan, go before Cordelia, and give bombastic speeches as to why they love him. Cordelia mutters to herself off to the side about how she feels, and how she loves her father, but cannot portray it like they can. When Lear asks for her flattery towards him she says: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty/ According to my bond; no more nor less.” (1.2.5-7). Cordelia says
Although they have different primary goals, they have fundamentally the same underlying structure. Gloucester has two sons, Edmund and Edgar. Edmund is a bastard son, while Edgar is Gloucester’s legitimate son, and therefore gets all of the inheritance. Edmund does not freely give love to his father; he doesn’t even really love his father out of his duty. He is extremely bitter with the primogeniture that occurs within this time period. Gloucester loves Edmund -- he acknowledges that he is his son, which is very scandalous during this time period. It’s an act of love. Edmund does not love Gloucester, because everything he does in this play negatively affects him, and he gets joy out of it. He deliberately betrayed his father so he could gain his title, and he let it go about harsh measures. He is a more evil parallel to Goneril and Regan in this sense that he doesn’t truly love his father, and cares more about himself rather than anyone else. Edgar is a parallel to Cordelia. Edgar loves his father throughout the play, although his confusion clouds his thoughts at times. Edgar is virtuous and comes to his father’s aid, when needed, and he even prevents him from committing suicide. Edgar loves his father not only out of duty, but his love has roots and was valuable. Filial love cannot just be out of duty, but it has to be freely given. To be freely given, the love needs to

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