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Humanity's Fate in King Lear
Many tragedies have been written throughout history. The purpose of these tragedies were to illustrate some type of moral lesson. The tragic situation involves man's miscalculation of reality and the fatal results of those miscalculations. Our tragic hero must endure a great deal of suffering. It ends in his ruin or destruction. We must also understand that tragedy not only destroys the guilty, but also the innocent. The tragic hero represents what could happen to humankind. He is responsible for his society. He is a representation of our own fate. The fate of humanity will be discussed in King Lear, by William Shakespeare.
In this moving play, our tragic hero was King Lear. Our tragic hero must also have a tragic flaw. Lear's tragic flaw was his vanity. Lear is so full of himself that he doesn't realize the truth. First of all, Lear wants to divide his kingdom up into three parts for his three daughters. Each daughter's portion depended on how much they would proclaim their love for him. Lear says, "Give me the map there. Know that we have divided in three our kingdom, and 'tis our fast intent to shake all cares and business from our age, conferring them on younger strengths while we unburdened crawl to death."(Act I, i, l. 38-41) Lear should not have relinquished his powers in the first place. He expects to be treated like a king when he no longer will have the power of a king. Secondly, he says, " Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love, long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, and here are to be answered. Tell me, my daughters ( Since now we will divest us both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state), which of you should we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge."(Act I, i, l. 47-53) Within these few lines, we see Lear's first sign of vanity. For one daughter to receive more land than another, one must proclaim their love to be more than the other. He is measuring their love with land. Naturally, his first two daughters, Goneril and Regan, will lie to him, but his vanity blinds him from the truth.
Lear's first miscalculation was dividing his land between the daughters. The second is allowing his vanity to get the best of him.
With Cordelia declared as banished, Lear states, “With my two daughters’ dowers digest the third...Only we shall retain The name and all th’ addition to a king. The sway, revenue, execution of the rest, Beloved sons, be yours” (Shakespeare 17). Lear’s fault here is that he believes that he can divide up his kingdom to his daughters and still retain the title as king; he wants to retire his position and responsibilities as a king but still remain respected and treated as one. His flaw in wanting to be superior leads to his downfall, as he is so blinded by his greed that he decides to divide up his kingdom to his two daughters who are as hungry for power as he is. They only want to strip him of his position and respect to gain more influence. Lear, not realizing the impact of such an impulsive decision, descends into madness when his daughters force him out of his home. After being locked out of his only shelter by his daughters, he states, “Filial ingratitude!...In such a night To shut me out?...O Regan, Goneril, Your old kind father whose frank heart gave all! O that way madness lies. Let me shun that; No more of that” (Shakespeare 137). Lear becomes fully aware of the consequences of his actions. He realizes how ungrateful his daughters are and how they have treated him unfairly even though he has given them everything; much to his dismay, he is left with
However, as their dreadful actions increased, they failed to realize the struggle to restore honor and certainty did as well. Shakespeare demonstrated how the only situation in which individuals struggle to restore honor is when that honor is gained through dominating and destroying the lives of others; when it is gained through wrongdoing. When the honor is gained through righteous actions, the challenges are easier to handle resulting in internal peace. Both of King Lear’s daughters were trapped in an illusion where they felt they must continue their mischief in order to gain honor. They both drew attention towards their status and power while neglecting their character. They failed to realize this thirst was only destroying the happiness they once owned. Their destruction occurred at the point where they both received what they had given their father: betrayal. Shakespeare presented the idea that restoring honor through harming others results in nothing but one’s self-destruction of their happiness and
Lear’s character is constantly and dramatically changing throughout the play both by growing as a character but also through many downfalls. Lear becomes emotionally stronger and gains much more rationale near the end of the play, but only after a great downfall in each of these sectors. This was a result of the self-entitlement that Lear had placed on himself. King Lear’s vanity and excessive sense of entitlement was his tragic flaw throughout the play. He was a King, and needed to be served on time. Furthermore, when he is referred to as “my lady’s father,” this also hurts his ego for he is a King and that is what he wishes to be addressed
... Lears blessing, and declared his daughter. Lear also realized that Kents speaking out was for Lear’s best and that he too was abused and banished. What stings Lear even more is that he is now completely dependent upon his two shameless daughters, Goneril and Regan. Plus that he must now beg them when he took care of them like a father when they were once children, to drive Lears further into madness he realizes that as king he was so ignorant and blind with power that he never took care of the homeless and let them suffer. All these realization and the fact that Lear is in his second childhood a tender stage drive him into the peak of madness.
In The Tragedy of King Lear, particularly in the first half of the play, Lear continually swears to the gods. He invokes them for mercies and begs them for destruction; he binds both his oaths and his curses with their names. The older characters—Lear and Gloucester—tend view their world as strictly within the moral framework of the pagan religion. As Lear expresses it, the central core of his religion lies in the idea of earthly justice. In II.4.14-15, Lear expresses his disbelief that Regan and Albany would have put the disguised Kent, his messenger, in stocks. He at first attempts to deny the rather obvious fact in front of him, objecting “No” twice before swearing it. By the time Lear invokes the king of the pagan gods, his refusal to believe has become willful and almost absurd. Kent replies, not without sarcasm, by affixing the name of the queen of the gods to a contradictory statement. The formula is turned into nonsense by its repetition. In contradicting Lear’s oath as well as the assertion with which it is coupled, Kent is subtly challenging Lear’s conception of the universe as controlled by just gods. He is also and perhaps more importantly, challenging Lear’s relationship with the gods. It is Kent who most lucidly and repeatedly opposes the ideas put forth by Lear; his actions as well as his statements undermine Lear’s hypotheses about divine order. Lear does not find his foil in youth but in middle age; not in the opposite excess of his own—Edmund’s calculation, say—but in Kent’s comparative moderation. Likewise the viable alternative to his relationship to divine justice is not shown by Edmund with his ...
King Lear is at once the most highly praised and intensely criticized of all Shakespeare's works. Samuel Johnson said it is "deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare" yet at the same time he supported the changes made in the text by Tate in which Cordelia is allowed to retire with victory and felicity. "Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles."1 A.C. Bradley's judgement is that King Lear is "Shakespare's greatest work, but it is not...the best of his plays."2 He would wish that "the deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloucester should be followed by the escape of Lear and Cordelia from death," and even goes so far as to say: "I believe Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the subject in hand a few years later...."3
(Act I, Sc i, Ln 47-53) This is the first and most significant of the many sins that he makes in this play. By abdicating his throne to fuel his ego he is disrupts the great chain of being which states that the King must not challenge the position that God has given him. This undermining of God's authority results in chaos that tears apart Lear's world. Leaving him, in the end, with nothing.
Fate in King Lear & nbsp; "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will. I will be able to do so. " These words from Hamlet are echoed, even more pessimistically, in Shakespeare's play, The Tragedy of King Lear, Gloucester. 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. & nbsp; An abundance of cyclic imagery in Lear shows that good people are.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were perhaps two of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world. These two civilizations thrived in their ancient environments which eventually led to a vast amount of prosperity within these two cultures. It is because of this prosperity that these ancient cultures were able to make a variety of advancements in literature, architecture, art and a variety of other fields. These two civilizations also produced some of the ancient world’s greatest writers, leaders, and philosophers. The cultures of ancient Greece and Rome made a number of contributions to western civilization in the form of advancements in literature, architecture, art, government, and philosophy.
Lear opens the play with the standard Shakespearean equation of appearance equals reality. In order to determine how his power and land is to be ...
Since Teen suicide is the second leading cause of teenage death in the United States, there is a need for legislation that promotes awareness and education about Cyber-Bullying. Due to the growth of technology in the American society, the younger generations of adolescents are adapting to the excessive use of computers, cell phones, and social-networking sites. According to a study done by Amanda Lenhart, 87% of adolescents who are between the ages of 12 and 17 are using the internet on a daily basis (Trolley, Shields, and Hanel, “Demystifying and Deescalating Cyber Bullying in the Schools”).With these numbers increasing across the nation, the numbers of adolescents being harassed through technology means is growing as well. The relationship between cyber bullying and teenage suicide has been named “cyber bullycide”. Studies show that 1/3 of teenagers who have used the internet have stated that they have received threatening or offensive messages either through text, e-mail, IM, and other technology related programs. In 2007 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially labeled “electronic aggression” being cyber bullying as an “emerging public health problem” (Billitteri 387).
Metcalf, T., & Metcalf, G. (Eds.). (2008). Perspectives on Diseases and Disorders: Obesity. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cengage Learning
One purpose for such a violent scene is to define the villains of the story. The play opens with King Lear retiring and deciding to split his land between his three daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. The size of the land plot each daughter will receive will be proportionate to their love for their father. The older two daughters Goneril and Regan eloquently announce their undying love for Lear, and are rewarded generously. The third daughter Cordelia, who truly does love her father, refuses to participate in such a display of flattery and lies. Cordelia announces, in front of all Lear's subjects, that she loves her father, "according to her bond, no more nor less." Insulted and hurt by Cordelia's harsh denouncement of love, Lear disowns her. And Lear's best friend of thirty years Kent defends Cordelia, Lear banishes Kent too. Having given away his land, Lear decides that he's going to take turns living with Goneril and Regan. To remind him of his kingship Lear kept a hundred knights. But when Lear shows up with his army at Goneril and Regan's houses, his "loving" daughters kick him out.
Lear's relationship with his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, is, from the beginning, very uncharacteristic of the typical father-daughter relationship. It's clear that the king is more interested in words than true feelings, as he begins by asking which of his daughters loves him most. Goneril and Regan's answers are descriptive and sound somewhat phony, but Lear is flattered by them. Cordelia's response of nothing is honest; but her father misunderstands the plea and banishes her. Lear's basic flaw at the beginning of the play is that he values appearances above reality. He wants to be treated as a king and to enjoy the title, but he doesn't want to fulfill a king's obligations. Similarly, his test of his daughters demonstrates that he values a flattering public display of love over real love. He doesn't ask "which of you doth love us most," but rather, "which of you shall we say doth love us most?" (I.i.49). It would be simple to conclude that Lear is simply blind to the truth, but Cordelia is already his favorite daughter at the beginning of the play, so presumably he knows that she loves him the most. Nevertheless, Lear values Goneril and Regan's fawning over Cordelia's sincere sense of filial duty.
King Lear is a play about a tragic hero, by the name of King Lear, whose flaws get the best of him. A tragic hero must possess three qualities. The first is they must have power, in other words, a leader. King Lear has the highest rank of any leader. He is a king. The next quality is they must have a tragic flaw, and King Lear has several of those. Finally, they must experience a downfall. Lear's realization of his mistakes is more than a downfall. It is a tragedy. Lear is a tragic hero because he has those three qualities. His flaws are his arrogance, his ignorance, and his misjudgments, each contributing to the other.