King Lear - Context - Filial Relationships

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Gillian Woods - AO5

Gillian Woods

The Fool suggests that "Lear himself is responsible for creating social disorder by promoting his daughters above their king and father"; he conveys this through the image of his daughters becoming "thy mothers"

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Routledge - AO3/5

Routledge

King Lear is unlike Shakespeare's early plays because it doesn't end with a "clear sense of resolution and closure and at least some hope that tragic or comic misdeeds can be redeemed, especially in reuniting warring families." 

Rather than exploring the comic implications of the father-daughter relationship as he had previously done, Shakespeare "suggested that the bond between father and daughter often bordered on incest or tragedy, threatening the foundations not just of the family but of society itself."

Reasons why Shakespeare may have written King Lear: "perhaps because he wanted to experiment with, or even radicalise, the genre of tragedy. Or he may have wanted to hand James [I] a warning about the disastrous consequences of dividing a kingdom. Or, as the father of two living daughters and a deceased son, Shakespeare may have been moved by the idea of expressing dutiful love between father and child".

Only Shakespeare where "the father-daughter relationship is multiplied three times over, giving his audience varied but increasingly painful accounts of the way in which familial love works". 

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Sean McEvoy - AO5

Sean McEvoy 

Lear, Regan and Goneril appear to view love as a "business deal"

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James I - AO3

James I

The True Law of Free Monarchies 

James I viewed his relationsihp as King with his subjects as the relationship between a father and children - link with Lear as his private family life becomes the (toxic) model for his public life 

Basilikon Doron (written for son, Henry)

James I uses the example of Brutus, whose children made the mistake of dividing Britain into England, Scotland and Wales, to warn Henry that shouldd these kingdoms be reunited, they must not then again be divided - "by dividng your kingdoms, ye shall leave the seed of division and discord among your posterity"

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Kathleen McLuskie - AO5

Kathleen McLuskie (Feminist critic)

The action and dynamics of the key parts of the play “all depend upon an audience accepting an equation between ‘human nature’ and male power” – this is because the chaos which ensues when the “primal links” of the daughters’ duty to their father are broken are depicted as an awful reverse of the natural order. 

"Family relations…are seen as fixed and determined, and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of rightful order” and therefore the actions of Regan and Goneril are seen “not simply as cruel and selfish but as a fundamental violation of human nature”, as is clearly demonstrated in speeches which condemn them.

"The generalised vision of chaos is presented in gendered terms in which patriarchy, the institution of male power in the family and the State, is seen as the only form of social organisatiion strong enough to hold chaos at bay".

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Coppélia Khan - AO3/5

Coppélia Khan

There is no literal mother, and the "crucial cataclysmic first scene...from which all its later action involves" shows "only fathers and their godlike capacity to make or mar their children"

The "consciouomission” of the maternal presence suggests that “children owe their existence to their fathers alone; the mother’s role in procreation is eclipsed by the father’s, which is used to affirm male prerogative and male power…the only source of love, power, and authority is the father – an awesome, demanding presence”.

The play depicts the “failure of the father’s power to command love in a patriarchal world and the emotional penalty he pays for wielding power”.

When Lear misses Cordelia and begins to realise his own vulnerability, he “calls his state of mind hysteria, ‘the mother’" which could be interpreted as "his repressed identification with the mother”.

Lear "wants two mutually exclusive things at one: to have absolute control over those closest to him and to be absolutely dependent on them"

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Leonard Tennenhouse - AO5

Leonard Tennenhouse 

Cordelia has to die because the play is more concerned with the "patriarchal principle" than the separation of the body politic and body natural. 

Shakespeare wants us to think of the bond between kinship and kingship in masculine terms, as demonstrated by Edgar and Gloucester in the subplot; were Cordelia to remain alive rather than Albany/Edgar, the crown would "descent to her upon Lear's death; either that or the play would challenge the metaphysics of blood all over again in giving the crown to a male". Instead, there is no direct heir left alive, so power immediately reverts back to the male. 

"What matters most in maintaining the order of the state is loyalty to the principle of blood - the metaphysical body of power - and not the individual who wields it."

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Samuel Johnson - AO5

Samuel Johnson (1765)

"The cruelty of the daughters in an historical fact, to which the poet has added little, has addded little, having only drawn it into a series by dialogue and action". 

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Stephen Greenblatt - AO3/5

Stephen Greenblatt

Lear wants to be the "sole object...even the sole recipient" of his children's love, only wanting it to be directed at others when he wishes it to be and seeing that as an indirect expression of love for himself. 

Lear's love test, for Cordelia at least, occurs at the age which "was for Shakespeare's England the age that demanded the greatest attention, instruction and discipline, the years between sexual maturity at fifteen and social maturity at about twenty-six" - this was also the average age of playgoers. 

Lear cannot "perceive the difference between his eldest daughters' blatant hypocrisy and his youngest daughter's truth, while Gloucester evidently does not know what his eldest (and sole legitimate) son's handwriting - his 'character' - looks like". This lack of perception demonstrates "not indifference by error" - Lear and Gloucester's attempts to decipher their children's chracters "is of the utmost importance in the play, which, after all, represents the fatal consequences of an incorrect 'reading'"

"The whole family...is intent on reading the signs in everyone else".

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Stephen Greenblatt - AO5

Stephen Greenblatt

In Edmund's forged letter is the "fears of the old...their fantasy of what the young, beneath the superficial marks of deference, are really thinking". This fear challenges the conception of the natural order of things and Lear is haunted by this fear, as seen through the "public agony of family and state relations"

"Shakespeare's play is powerfully situation in the midst of...the terror of being turned out of doors or of becoming a stranger even in one's own house...the humiliating loss of parental authority, the dread...of being supplanted by the young"

"Lear, who has, he thinkgs, given all to his children, demands all from them" through the love test. 

The tension between the public and the personal: "as the play's tragic logic reveals, Lear cannot have both the public deference and the inward love of his children"

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Sam Mendes - AO5

Sam Mendes

"The two aspects of the play run concurrently: the breakdown of the family and the breakdown of the nation"

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