[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Almost all of the main characters wind up dead; only Albany, Edgar, and Kent walk off the stage at the end, and the aging, unhappy Kent predicts his imminent demise.Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, and Lear lie dead onstage, and Edmund and Gloucester have passed away offstage.Albany philosophizes about his merciless end when he says, “All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deserving” (V.iii.301-303).One can argue that these words suggest that, in some sense, order and justice have triumphed over villainy and cruelty, and that the world is a just place after all.But one can also argue that Albany's words ring hollow: most of the virtuous characters die along with the villains, making it difficult to interpret the scene as poetic justice.Indeed, death seems to be a defining motif for the play, embracing characters indiscriminately.We may feel that the disloyal Goneril and Regan, the treacherous Edmund, the odious Oswald, and the brutal Cornwall richly deserve their deaths.But, in the last scene, when the audience expects some kind of justice to be doled out, the good characters—Gloucester, Cordelia, Lear—die as well, and their bodies litter the stage alongside the corpses of the wicked.This final, harrowing wave of death raises, yet again, a question that has burned throughout the play: is there any justice in the world? Albany's suggestion that the good and the evil both ultimately get what they deserve does not seem to hold true.Lear, howling over Cordelia's body, asks, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” (V.iii.305-306).This question can be answered only with the stark truth that death comes to all, regardless of each individual's virtue or youth.The world of King Lear is not a Christian cosmos: there is no messiah to give meaning to suffering and no promise of an afterlife.All that King Lear offers is despair.The play's emotional extremes of hope and despair, joy and grief, love and hate, are brought to the fore as well in this final scene.Lear's address to Cordelia at the beginning of the scene is strangely joyful.He creates an intimate world that knows only love: “We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage./ When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, / And ask of thee forgiveness” (V.iii.9-11).This blissful vision, however, is countered by the terrible despair that Lear evokes at Cordelia's death: “Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never.” (V.iii.306-307).Yet, despite his grief, Lear expires in a flash of utterly misguided hope, thinking that Cordelia is coming back to life.In a sense, this final, false hope is the most depressing moment of all.Similarly, Gloucester, as Edgar announces, dies partly of joy: “his flawed heart— /./ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly” (V.iii.195-198).Even Edmund, learning of Goneril's and Regan's deaths, says, “Yet Edmund was beloved./ The one the other poisoned for my sake, / And after slew herself” (V.iii.238-240).Even the cruel Edmund thinks of love in his last moments, a reminder of the warmth of which his bastard birth deprived him.But for him and the two sister queens, as for everyone else in King Lear, love seems to lead only to death.In perhaps the play's final cruelty, the audience is left with only a terrifying uncertainty: the good and the evil alike die, and joy and pain both lead to madness or death.The corpses on the stage at the end of the play, of the young as well as the old, symbolize despair and death—just as the storm at the play's center symbolizes chaos and madness.For Lear, at least, death is a mercy.As Kent says, “The wonder is, he hath endured so long” in his grief and madness (V.iii.315).For the others, however, we are left wondering whether there is any justice, any system of punishment and reward in the “tough world” of this powerful but painful play (V.iii.313).ThemesJusticeKing Lear is a brutal play, filled with human cruelty and awful, seemingly meaningless disasters.The play's succession of terrible events raises an obvious question for the characters—namely, whether there is any possibility of justice in the world, or whether the world is fundamentally indifferent or even hostile to humankind.Various characters offer their opinions: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport,” Gloucester muses, realizing it foolish for humankind to assume that the natural world works in parallel with socially or morally convenient notions of justice (IV.i.37-38).Edgar, on the other hand, insists that “the gods are just,” believing that individuals get what they deserve (V.iii.169).But, in the end, we are left with only a terrifying uncertainty—although the wicked die, the good die along with them, culminating in the awful image of Lear cradling Cordelia's body in his arms.There is goodness in the world of the play, but there is also madness and death, and it is difficult to tell which triumphs in the end.Authority versus ChaosKing Lear is about political authority as much as it is about family dynamics.Lear is not only a father but also a king, and when he gives away his authority to the unworthy and evil Goneril and Regan, he delivers not only himself and his family but all of Britain into chaos and cruelty.As the two wicked sisters indulge their appetite for power and Edmund begins his own ascension, the kingdom descends into civil strife, and we realize that Lear has destroyed not only his own authority but all authority in Britain.The stable, hierarchal order that Lear initially represents falls apart and disorder engulfs the realm.The failure of authority in the face of chaos recurs in Lear's wanderings on the heath during the storm.Witnessing the powerful forces of the natural world, Lear comes to understand that he, like the rest of humankind, is insignificant in the world.This realization proves much more important than the realization of his loss of political control, as it compels him to re-prioritize his values and become humble and caring.With this newfound understanding of himself, Lear hopes to be able to confront the chaos in the political realm as well.ReconciliationDarkness and unhappiness pervade King Lear, and the devastating Act V represents one of the most tragic endings in all of literature [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]