Symbols and Motifs in King Lear

The issue of blindness is associated to the highest degree obviously with Gloucester, who is blinded in the course of the play. It is peculiarly congruously for Gloucesters eyeball to be the organs through which he is tortured. Gloucester thought he saw the truth about his sons, but was in fact blind. With his eye put out he does indeed see the truth. Gloucester before he lost his look was spiritually blind, and could not tell the difference between a heartfelt son and a bad (Muir, lx). It is this physical distress that brings out the long debilitated moral stamina that has underlain his sympathy. Losing his eyes enables him to benefit heroic and tragic proportions. He surely has the right to say, All unappeasable and comfortless (III, vii, 84). There is no irritating shadow of egotism on his accounts of his predicament. And when he learns that Edmund has betrayed him, his response is astonishing and wonderful O my follies Then Edgar was abused. / physique gods, forgive me that and prosper him (III, vii, 90-1). He knows that his injury to Edgar can never be forgivenYou cannot see your way.I have no way, and at that placefore want no eyesI stumbled when I saw.(IV, i, 17-19).Gloucesters blindness is also a reflection of the unreformed Lears arrogant folly, and his inability to tell a good daughter from a bad, until he has been through his own ordeal.The StormIn III, i, the Gentle composition gives us an account of Lears behaviour which shows him as, in a way, indulging in a sort of theatrical introduction, enjoying the spectacle of himself suffering in the hale. The storm seems to conjure up to Lear as a sort of melodramatic setting for a display of what is at this peak his martyr-like self-pity. tears his white hair/ Strives in his piffling solid ground of man to out-storm / The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain (III, i, 6-10). But Lear has not in time reached the truth about himself. This is important because it is tempting to see the storm as a symbolic event, and Lear as man in the abstract cont abrogateing with the forces of evil. Shakespeargon makes us stand back from Lear still, and not identify with him. The real meaning of the storm lies in the thought that it was inhumanly cruel of the daughters to shut him out on much(prenominal) a night.Certainly Kents description of the peculiar severity of the storm prompts ace to see it as more than just a physical event. He has never in his life seen such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid expand (III, ii, 46) etc., and the implication is that the storm has more than natural causes. This leads Lear to his reflection on the violence of the storm to p flout evil and crime Let the Great Gods, / That constrain this dreadful pudder oer our heads, / Find out their enemies now (IV, ii, 49-51). His evolution freneticness takes the form an obsessive interpretation of all ills in footing of his own personal sufferings. Shakespeargon makes sure we see the point this temp est in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else / Save what beats there (III, iv, 12-14).It is the internal tempest that matters in the drama, and the way it brings Lear to roughly sort of wisdom. The madness of the elements leads him to a great advance when he sees Edgar as elemental man. here real truth starts to appear to him Is man no more than this? unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, b are, forked tool as thou art (III, iv, 105-111). He sees, for the first time, beyond the arise of things, and understands the folly of snobbery and blind selfishness in human life. His own harness of pomp are vain, he sees himself as deluded, and Edgar as the truth.MadnessLears establish into madness is his way to transformation. One of his mad notions is to imagine the mock campaign of the sisters. The symbolic force of this is evident(To Edgar) Thou, robed man of justice, take thy place.(To the Fool) And thou, his union fellow of equity,Bench by his side. (To Ke nt) You are othcommission nonplus you too. (III, vi, 37-40).Here is a Christian inversion of the social order a mad beggar, a fool, and an exiled man are set up over the decent to sit in judgement on them. It is a mad externalize of Lears, but it has a deep significance in the criticism of sullen sophistication that the play poses. An unjust society has helped Lear to be an egotist and to do evil, as Kent said in the first diorama. Now Lear is acquirement and fall his own sophistication in the face of Edgar, the thing itself. What he is learning is the need for humility, and respect for others, and the importance of setting ones eyes on the real truths of human existence if one is to live competencyily and with meaning. The knowledge Lear gains is percolated through his madness.But Gloucester does not go mad. He endures ein truththing. As he learns from Edgars lesson on the cliff, it is not mans right to choose his end. The point of that strange scene seems to be summarised at the end by Gloucesters description of their relative fatesThe index is mad how pie-eyed is my vile senseThat I stand up, and have ingenious feelingOf my huge sorrows discover I were distractSo should my thoughts be severd from my griefs,And woes by wrong imaginations loseThe knowledge of themselves. (IV, vi, 28106)I suggest that through him we grasp the telephone exchange thread, which has to do with love and suffering and sticking it out to the end Lear is spared the worst. Gloucester gets it (Mason, 1970, p.200).In Lears crazed mind all authority is in the hands of those who are unworthy. It is only their established power, their rank and ceremonial clothes that distinguish the decide from the accused. Morality is cynically ignored. Only selfishness rules. Let copulation thrive and the world in Lears distorted mind looks very like that presupposed by Edmunds view of nature, a sort of hobo camp of self-interest, power and lust.BetrayalWhen Cordelia refuses to do what her f oolish father wants in the first scene she invokes the idea of the adherence. I love your majesty / According to my bond (I, i, 92-3) And by bond she essence something quite different from the bondage that he interprets it as. The question of the bonds of human relationships is exchange to the play why human beings fail in their bonds, as the daughters do with Lear, and Edmund does with his father is the horrific mystery that Shakespeare cannot solve. Cordelia goes on to spell out, in an abashed way she had always thought it was obvious what she means by bond.It is the natural range of duties and affection that exist between children and parents. Kent too speaks of some other bond, the sacred responsibilities of service. Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honourd as my King, / Lovd as my father, as my master followd (I, i, 139-141). It is the betrayal of these bonds that causes such chaos in the moral world of King Lear, of which Jan Kott says There is neither Christian heaven, n or the heaven predicted by humanists. King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies (Kott, 1967, p.116).Edmunds speech in I, ii is plain because his thought is plain. There is no hesitation in him because there are no doubts, and no traces of decent feeling in him at all. He is utterly conscienceless. Nothing in him works to check the urge of ruthlessness. His closeness to the sisters is clear. His Nature, it is pretty obvious, is a different concept from that sham in Cordelias definition of the natural bonds of feeling and duty which be decent society. It is, for him, nature as expressed in the law of the jungle naked self-interest and the pursuit of power. He is appalling in his plainness. The sisters are equally ready to betray normal ties. It is astonishing to hear Regans total failure to respond to Lears appeals for sympathy. After all, however absurd his selfishness, he is her father. But she responds, as does Goneril, like a machine, with an icy formalness of tone which is the voice of cold reason.O, Sir you are old,Nature in you stands on the very vergeOf her confine you should be ruld and ledBy some discretion that discerns your stateBetter then you yourself. (II, iv, 147-151).We might be tempted to agree with Bradley that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their children and of the children against their fathers (Bradley, 214). But the bonds are not always betrayed. A notable incident in III, vii, the scene in which Gloucester is blinded, is the intervention of the servant. He acts purely on a human-centered instinct of decency, knowing in his soul that such conduct as Cornwalls is not tolerable in a human world. He invokes the sacred bond of service, just as Kent did to Lear Hold your hand, my lord / I have served you ever since I was a child / But break in service have I never done you / Than now to weightlift you hold (III, vii, 71-4). The point here the inf initely blessed and optimistic point is that this man is not a hero, but simply a decent human being. But he is ready to die in excuse of a tolerable worldWorks CitedBradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London Macmillan, Second edition, 1905.Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski, London, Methuen, second edition 1967.Mason, H.A., Shakespeares Tragedies of Love, London, Chatto and Windus, 1970.Shakespeare, W. The Arden Shakespeare King Lear. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London Methuen, 1980.