Machiavellian characters in King Lear - Book Report/Review Example

Machiavellian characters in King Lear One of the main strengths of Shakespeare’s characterization is that he makes his characters real, flesh-and blood-people, who are layered and dynamic, just like people in the everyday world. In King Lear, he has created some of the most Machiavellian characters in his gallery of masterpieces: Goneril, Regan, and of course, the utterly villainous Edmund. All of them are monsters in their own right, but what is remarkable is that they all start out as normal people with whom the audience could have some degree of sympathy. It is a testament to the genius of Shakespeare that he is able to trace the birth, ripening and consequences of evil through the development of these characters in the novel. Before commenting on the characterization of these dramatis personae, it is important to elaborate on how Shakespeare has used the plot to show off the characters against each other so that the nature of evil is strikingly evident. In the macrocosm of this play, Shakespeare starts with two parallel stories before merging them eventually. The first and the main plotline is one that involves King Lear and his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The second involves the life of one of the King’s faithful, Gloucester, and his two sons, the legitimate Edgar, and the illegitimate Edmund. Both Goneril and Regan fall in love with Edmund, forming a trio of evil, but Edmund becomes the catalyst that sets off the destruction of the two sisters. The parallel plot brings out the nature of evil not only in the characters of Goneril and Regan in sharp contrast to that of Cordelia’s goodness, it also provides Edgar’s devotion to the audience as a foil for the heartlessness of Edmund. Shakespeare has managed to explore all the angles to his theme of loyalty, betrayal and the rise of evil through these three characters: two of the legitimate daughters of King Lear who turn against their father, and the illegitimate son of Gloucester who tricks him into his doom. Then, the sisters fall for the charms of the snake-like Edmund and enter into a love triangle, betraying their respective husbands, Albany and Cornwall, and taking evil to its logical conclusion. As Halio puts it, the various forms of good and evil are expertly juxtaposed by Shakespeare through the use of the double storylines which have allowed the audience to identify evil in contrast from the good characters, and shown how the fallen characters feed off each other’s evil: The double plot Shakespeare uses in King Lear does more than universalize his themes, although it certainly does that. It also distinguishes among various kinds of good and evil and a human being’s possible responses to them. By connecting the two plots in the climactic series of events in act 5, Shakespeare further heightens the dramatic effect of his tragedy, showing how evil embraces evil but ultimately does not prevail.(Halio, 2001, 35) From the bigger picture, we can now move towards examining each of the characters in turn, in order to show the trajectory of evil in their respective cases. Shakespeare does not provide much of context for any of these three characters, not much by the way of their childhood but still manages to show the audience how evil can take root in the most commonplace people. He does this by setting up scenarios where the characters can be clearly seen to have a motive for turning evil. One of the pivoting scenes in King Lear is the one where the aging king asks all of his daughters to profess their love for him in public, in front of the court, and makes it a condition for the portions of the kingdom they were to inherit: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most,/ That we our largest bounty may extend”. As Cahn puts it, King Lear commits a major blunder by mixing filial love and politics together, which made the move somewhat of an insult to his daughters. On the one hand, Lear is indulging himself, playing the proud father, and displaying for the court his love for his daughters with the expectation that they will reciprocate. In addition, he is attempting to bring some warmth to a formal event. Yet he is also doing something far more misguided. With his demand, which is an affront to his grown daughters, the King violates the relationship between parent and child. By requesting statements of love, Lear puts the royal occasion ahead of family duty. He turns the sacred bond with his children into a ceremony for the pleasure of the court and the gratification of his ego. His pride supersedes more important values.(Cahn, 1996, 140) Goneril and Regan respond to this insult with exaggerated praises, and even the gentle and honest Cordelia spoke out of offended dignity. The audience can see how Lear put so much store on appearances and was a despotic man with an enormous ego which could not have been easy on his daughters. It is significant that the two elder sisters resort to flattery, as people in a situation without power and influence are likely to do. In contrast, Cordelia can afford to be a little more forthright based on the confidence she has on being the clear favorite, King Lear’s “joy”, and the one with the most influence on the King. When the kingdom was divided between Goneril and Regan, because of Cordelia’s refusal to flatter, the sisters suddenly got to have an enormous amount of power after living their lives so far in the shadow of their father’s megalomania. To move from a life with no political power to another where they have absolute power, must have been a tremendous change and a heady experience for the two daughters. They had presumably had a long wait in order to receive this power, and once they had it, they wanted to use it for their own selves, to increase their own prestige and status. Goneril and Regan only wanted to get on with their lives, and enjoy the political power that had come into their hands, since they were now more powerful than the erstwhile King; they saw no reason to be respectful to him. They did not have a set of values to abide by; they did not feel that filial loyalty is a tradition worth adhering to, because they saw no tangible gain in it. For these sisters there was no concept of a standard virtue by which one must live, they saw life as merely a playing field where one must seize opportunities. They had found their opportunity, and were trying to secure their own individual interests. Their father had had his time, and now it was theirs. Goneril even feels wronged by her father, and feels his senility and refusal to give up the reins altogether is causing a lot of nuisance: “By day and night he wrongs me; every hour / He flashes into one gross crime or other,/ That sets us all at odds: I'll not endure it: /His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us/On every trifle”. She resents the fact that the Lear has abdicated his throne, but he yet wants to retain power and a say in how things are run around the palace: “Idle old man,/ That still would manage those authorities/That he hath given away!” Here it is also relevant to recall that they feel that Lear lacks judgment in banishing Cordelia, though it could not have been easy to live with a sister who their father had favored more than them: “You see how full of changes his age is; the /observation we have made of it hath not been / little: he always loved our sister most; and/ with what poor judgment he hath now cast her off /appears too grossly”. They do have sense of reasoning and judgment at this point. So their actions against their father, like removing part of his retinue, could have a logical justification as well, however small. The sisters may have started out without malice, but became increasingly cruel as Lear reacted virulently to his loss of power and capability. Granted, he was not an easy person to deal with, but it is significant that the sisters are able to casually justify their callous behavior towards him. Having no concept of filial respect and only their self-occupied ways of thinking, Goneril and Regan are blind to the plight of others. Treating others from whom they have nothing to gain as dispensable objects becomes a deadly habit. The two sisters simply allow their father to sink himself, because he is only a raving nuisance to them. Goneril comes across as an aggressive woman, a woman who knows her mind and is not afraid to speak it. But given a degree of absolute power that she has never been used to, she lets it go to her head. From an almost logical objection to the ways of Lear’s retinue of hundred men, “…. your insolent retinue/Do hourly carp and quarrel; breaking forth/ In rank and not-to-be endured riots” she goes on to fear that her father may use this band of hundred men against his own daughters. For Lear, these men are a way of establishing his identity as a person, and Goneril wants to deny him that sense of identity. She does not feel in debt of her father. For her, the inheritance is a result of the natural way of the world, and her father had not done her any special favors. Regan is not very different from her sister; power does not sit well in her hands either. She follows her sister Goneril’s lead in banishing the very father who had granted her half his kingdom, deliberately inciting Lear’s wrath first by excessively punishing his servant. When her father is on bended knees before her asking for food, shelter, and clothing: “Age is unnecessary: on my knees I beg/ That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food” she casually replies: “Good sir, no more; these are unsightly tricks:/ Return you to my sister”. Goneril and Regan are almost indistinguishable in their cruelties, because the evil in the them springs from a similar set of individualistic thoughts. They feel justified in pursuing their own interests and using their power without any sense of moral values, which makes them more evil and crueler by the hour. Their negative natures reach a climax as both fall for the charms of Edmund, despite being married. They thus betray their husbands who have stood by them throughout. Here, even their own alliance fails because their natures have now become cruelly selfish. Goneril kills Regan, despite their relation, because she can think only of herself, and cannot bear that the widowed Regan should be able to perhaps marry Edmund. Shakespeare shows how the evil of the two sisters takes them down a vortex----- from selfishness, to corruption by power, to indescribable cruelties, jealousy, and ultimately, a betrayal of their sisterhood itself that ends in murder and suicide. Having looked at Goneril and Regan, and their descent into hellish cruelty and immorality, we turn towards Edmund, one of Shakespeare’s most remarkable villains. Edmund is the illegitimate son of Gloucester, who has long been bandied about as the bastard son. Gloucester himself introduces Edmund to Kent with a certain levity: “though this knave came something saucily into the/ world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair; / there was good sport at his making, and the/ whoreson must be acknowledged”. Being called a “whoreson” while being introduced to people has not been easy for Edmund, and when Gloucester casually mentions that Edmund “…hath been out nine years, and away he shall/ again”, the audience knows that Edmund is mostly sent out of sight, and hence will never be a respectable fixture in Gloucester’s home, and possibly not inherit a fortune. Both of these factors incense Edmund, who does not wish to be treated as a pariah both by his own father and the society around him. He thinks his birth is not his fault, but his father’s: “Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,/Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,” . Edmund also perhaps justifiably feels he is qualified to inherit Gloucester’s fortunes because his illegitimacy does not take away his merits in other respects, and he questions his treatment as a bastard: “For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon- shines/ Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?/ When my dimensions are as well compact,/ My mind as generous, and my shape as true,/As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us/ With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?”. But seeing no morally sound way to rectify the situation, he declares his intentions of evening the odds irrespective of the means and the cost and so begins his descent into evil. “Well, then,/ Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:/ Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund/ As to the legitimate: fine word, –legitimate!/ Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,/ And my invention thrive, Edmund the base/ Shall top the legitimate”. The audience can see how Edmund’s machinations rise from being discriminated against on the basis of something that was not really his fault. Thus “the plague of custom” becomes his enemy; he praises the natural, anarchic order which lets the most powerful survive, as against social custom which declares him unsuitable for power and fortune on the basis of his birth. As with Goneril and Regan, Edmund’s evil is not one he was born with, but to which he gradually gravitated because of his individualistic way of thinking, according to which he could do anything to get what he wanted. In fact, Edmund seems not a little attractive to the audience. There are many normal people like Edmund who strive to rise above their circumstances, "Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit; / All with me's meet that I can fashion fit", and Shakespeare gives him power and intelligence much above par. He has a sense of humor, a vigorous disposition, and is very much in touch with reality, very unlike Edgar and Gloucester who are easily fooled. His rebellious streak is not unjustified in a society where those like Lear and Gloucester are steeped in a complacent sense of their patriarchal power. But in his reckless ambition, Edmund becomes a consummate schemer, and Shakespeare shows us the consequence of ambition untemepered by conscience. Edmund fools his father, as well as his brother, and even seduces both the royal sisters Goneril and Regan, in a bid to rise above his birth. He is cold, capable, and completely devoid of conscience when it comes to achieving his ends. He does not act out of malice, but an inexorable need to achieve power. As he achieves more through his immoral ways, Edmund sinks deeper into evil, treating people like pawns and manipulating them to his own ends. Though he was not interested in killing his father or his brother at the beginning, merely wanting them out of his way as he pursued power, he eventually becomes willing to torture his father, and order the senseless execution of Cordelia. The attitude of adopting any means whatsoever for an end extends finally into physical cruelty. By the end of the play, all three of King Lear’s major villains meet with dreadful ends, as a consequence of their own evil. But Shakespeare does not make this a play where the good get rewarded and the evil punished. While those that are evil meet with their deaths, the innocent die too: Lear, Gloucester and Cordelia die despite not having done much to deserve it. Shakespeare seems to say that evil is a part of human existence, and the world is not a just place. Death takes those that are evil and those that are innocent seemingly without reason. But it is important to have a sense of fair play and morality, because one would prefer to die a Cordelia than a Goneril, Regan, or Edmund. As Maynard Mack puts it eloquently: If there is any "remorseless process" in King Lear, it is one that begs us to seek the meaning of our human fate not in what becomes of us, but in what we become. Death, as we saw, is miscellaneous and commonplace; it is life whose quality may be made noble and distinctive. Suffering we all recoil from; but we know it is a greater thing to suffer than to lack the feelings and virtues that make it possible to suffer. Cordelia, we may choose to say, accomplished nothing; yet we know it is better to have been Cordelia than to have been her sisters. ( Mack, 1993, 180) Works Cited Page Cahn, Victor L. Shakespeare the Playwright: A Companion to the Complete Tragedies, Histories, Comedies, and Romances. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, p.140. Halio, Jay L. King Lear: A Guide to the Play, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001, p. 35. Mack, Maynard. Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, p.180. Read More