A Divine Cause for Abandoning Reason in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Abstract

King Lear can be considered as one of the most powerful tragedies written by Shakespeare. Written nearly 400 years ago, it appeals to todays’ literary critiques, psychologists and psychiatrists. Shakespeare’s construction of madness is so deep that psychiatrists diagnose the type of madness King Lear suffers from with its various aspects, such as mental disorder, mania, and dementia. One of the elements that triggers his dementia is stress which can be found in Lear’s case due to the corrupted relationship with daughters. Lear has unsolved problems with all of his daughters. Lear does not love them as a father, he loves them as a mother would do hence, their abandonment leads to his collapse. In the father-dominant family model of Elizabethan times King Lear was written, this idea is emphasized in the play further with the exclusion of a mother. King Lear does not only maintain kingly authority but also as the only head of the family and care-giver for his daughters, he maintains both a father’s and mother’s authority role. King Lear does not have a wife to consult when he’s distressed and ask for comfort, however he has his daughters. The play starts off exactly with Lear asking for consolation and love from his daughters. Cordelia’s refusal to give a solid consolation to him results in chaos for Lear who is in desperate need to receive affection. From the very beginning of the play, there is a fight between chaos and order in the kingdom and in King Lear’s mind. In this chaos, madness does not only act as the accelerating power of chaos but also as the remedy of it. In other words, the madness in the play also leads the play back to order. When talking about madness in the play, King Lear and Edgar come to mind as one goes mad and one pretends to be mad. This essay explores King Lear’s madness in the light of new literary studies. It aims to look into the various aspects madness that proceeds from chaos to order through the characters of King Lear and Edgar, and from blindness to healthy eyesight both in metaphoric and literal sense through the characters of King Lear and Gloucester who see better and become wiser in the end.