Lear and Family

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The Importance of Family Family is what defines one's character and identity.

Shakespeare's

tragic play, King Lear, presents a ruling family and how its members' relationships

affect one another. The crumbling relationship between King Lear and his daughters

exemplifies his struggle to maintain his role in his family and his identity within

the state. Lear explains that human nature is marked by a desire for more than just

the necessities one already has. Lear needs more than the necessities of life not

only to survive but to keep his identity. However, Lear mistakes these needs and

misidentifies himself based on his titles than what he truly needs: his family.

King Lear gives a prime example of how relationships between a father and his

daughters can result in destruction, chaos, and insanity. In Act 2, scene 4, of

Shakespeare's play, King Lear's two eldest daughters Goneril and Regan refuse to

accommodate their father with shelter and disobey his requests. After awarding

Goneril and Regan his kingdom for professing their love to him, Lear requests that

he keeps one-hundred men and maintains his title as the king. By denying Lear these

desires, Goneril and Regan spark the beginning of Lear's ruin and downfall. Lear

professes his anger at his daughters with his speech of "Oh reason not the need"

(II, sc 4, ll. 262, p. 57).

Lear's desire to keep his identity as the king in the state diminishes. Lear's

insanity begins when he loses his identity as a recognized figure of family and

state. He mistakenly identifies himself as those figures. When he loses his hundred

men, Lear loses his identity as the king. He has been stripped to nothing and can

no longer recognize h...

... middle of paper ...

...mportance is not

what he needs to survive. Rather, it is his daughter Cordelia that he really needs.

At the end of the play, King Lear cries out with his animalistic howls with

Cordelia's dead body in his arms. His death shortly after signifies Cordelia's

necessity for Lear's survival in life.

By the end of the play, Lear's realization of his mistakes is too late to save him.

He realizes that Cordelia was the very thing that he needed. Shakespeare's tragic

play King Lear shows how familial relationships are integral to survival. What one

truly needs his family. The relationships we have with our family define our

character and can conversely drive us to insanity. Shakespeare's use of a ruling

family provides the claim that Lear's needs are not met by his role as king; rather

they are met by his relationship and love for his daughters.

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