English- Shakespeare
12/11/2015
Love Lost
Art embodies an individually ideal idolism of the life of mankind, and the finer the art the finer the example; the stronger the metaphor. Art is an expression of pure life, often so pure it is most difficult to comprehend or even see how the two can be so intimately related for we are so accustomed to the diluted essence of that which makes us human. We then are shocked and appalled at watching a Shakespearian tragedy unfold on stage because of the seemingly ceaseless suffering and heartache which occurs. But why should we be so appalled at such things? Our own lives are full of bad times, of our families slowly dying off and sometimes too our friends; except in the real world this all happens in this diluted sense, and so we think that it does not happen like it happens in tragedies. For tragedies accentuate the turmoil of life, leaving both the benevolent as well as the mundane times out of the picture so that the audience may better study what it is that makes the bad times bad, perhaps so too to aid our understanding of what it is that makes the good the good. One of the particular themes in Shakespearian tragedy is Love, and as is plain to see in the example of King Lear, characters whom immerse themselves in acts of love are weakened or made irrational by their adherence to such an emotion. Othello is another classic example of the degenerative nature of love upon its courtier.
King Lear provides a prime example for demonstrating the case of my argument: love is mankind’s folly and consistently leads one into a state of decay; as it turns out we are in fact blind to our greatest disability. In fact we are so ignorant of it that we profess it as an achievement worthy of blessed afterlife, salvation, and many other, more physical, types of treasures:
King Lear once ruled in this land
With princely power and peace,
And had all things with heart’s content
That might his joys increase.
Amongst those gifts that nature gave
Three daughters fair had he,
So princely-seeming beautiful
As fairer could not be (King Lear 280).
So here we have King Lear, and Lear is a baller: massive coffers filled with gold, expansive territorial claims, mad respect from all the Dukes of his land. What more could a guy ask for? How about the precious gift of children? Three girls to be precise, and his love for them is without limit. He wishes to express his love by retiring and dividing his riches and land between the three girls:
Know we have divided
In three our kingdom, and ‘tis our first intent
To shake all cares and business off our state,
Confirming them on younger years (1.37-40).
The kingdom does not divide into three equal pieces however, and so Lear must decide which daughter to offer the largest piece to. Such a difficult decision though, a larger piece of the kingdom will implicitly state an advanced degree of love for the chosen child, and Lear loves each of his daughters so much that he cannot have them thinking he favours one over the others; alas one of them must receive the largest portion. The decision is reached that it would be best to allow them to compete with one another for the prize spot, both in the kingdom as well as in their father’s affections, and the most appropriate way to decide who ‘gets the most love’ is to determine which of the three loves him the most:
Tell me, my daughters,
Which of you shall we say doth love us the most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where merit doth most challenge it? (1.44-7)
Proceeding from eldest to youngest, the girls each have an opportunity to profess their love before the King, their father. The eldest child, Gonoril, as well as the middle child, Regan, both verbally-prostrate themselves before the court in expressing their affections and admiration of Lear. However when it is Cordelia’s, the youngest daughter, turn she has nothing to say except:
You have begot me, bred me, loved me.
I return those duties back as are right fit-
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands if they say
They love you at all? Haply when I shall wed
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all (1.88-95).
She speaks harsh words, not at her father yet, at her sisters. She tells Lear that she loves him only as much as she owes him to, no less and no more, but perhaps this is misleading in itself because ‘as much as she owes him’ is an infinite amount! The same amount of love as he holds for her, which from parent to child is not measurable for sheer quantity. Now she discredits her sisters’ professions of love, arguing to the fact that they, unlike Cordelia, are married, and marriage is a bond of love so therefore their love is divided between husband and father, making it an amount only half of Cordelia’s own. Finally Cordelia, in the last two lines quoted above, claims she will never marry so that her love for Lear is never divided and thus absolutely pure and true. Lear in his senility (1.278-83) divides his kingdom between his two eldest daughters, meanwhile disowning and banishing Cordelia from the land because he feels rejected by this daughter who he so does love:
Let her be thine we
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again. Therefore be gone,
Without our grace, our love, our benison (1.252-55).
The only reason for him to so absolutely reject someone who he loves is that he feels hurt, rejected by her, and therefore if she will not love him nor shall he love her. This rejection of Cordelia is clearly an outward show and only serves to provide a foil to his inward feelings for his youngest daughter. In an ironic twist of fate Gonoril and Regan, in taking control of the kingdom, immediately cast out old Lear to starve as a beggar. They have their power and riches and therefore find no more use in loving him, and so we find it a fault of Lear’s to love, his love for Cordelia led him to such rash decisions for fear the love was not requited. It is the love which makes Lear fearful, and it is the fear which makes him foolish. Through the tale’s progression Lear admits to himself that he was wrong to cast Cordelia out, and through certain powers they are reunited and the true degree of love between the two is felt:
[R]estoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made! (21.24-7)
Cordelia is asking the being she calls Restoration to endow her lips with the power to ease her father’s suffering when she kisses him. Cordelia loves her father so much she vows to take back his kingdom from her wretched sisters, and for her attempt she is captured and hung (24.248-57); leaving Lear to die of heartbreak at having lost her (24.306-12). Cordelia’s love for her father leads her to be brash in her actions, and such brashness leads to her death; so we find it a fault of Cordelia’s to have loved.
King Lear’s deep seated affections for his daughter Cordelia are demonstrated in a particularly atypical form which the reader could easily overlook. Lear is vastly and immeasurably dictated by his failing grasp at love. His desire for love, and his having sought after love (the love of his daughters), led him to the situation in which he divides his kingdom into two instead of three, and from there the degeneration of all aspects of Lear’s life truly commence. His physical state declines rapidly as his two eldest daughters attempt to symbolically crush his sway over the kingdom’s people’s hearts:
Pray, let’s hit together. If our
father carry authority with such disposition as he bears,
this last surrender of his will but offend us (1.292-94).
The mental degradation which Lear undergoes is much more subtle, and it has been proposed that it truly occurs around Scene XI, during which Lear and his small train arrive in the swamp with a vicious storm blowing; it is the storm which is viewed as the manifestation of Lear’s madness. I am in agreement that Lear’s journey amidst the violent storm is indeed the outward manifestation of his madness; however I am confident that madness did not simply come upon Lear at this point. Madness is a fust which encroaches from the inside out, an elusive chiding of the conscience which builds up to such a point that it then bursts from the mind and spills into the world around. The storm in the swamp has been designated as the bursting forth from the mind of Lear’s madness. What then is the elusive chiding of conscience? It is the Fool. It is noted that Lear’s Fool disappears after Scene XIII, we encounter Lear next in Scene XXI and he is without his Fool, however Cordelia is now present. If we go back to the beginning of the play we shall notice that Cordelia is cast out by Lear in Scene I, and the next time the reader encounters Lear is in Scene V, and along with his Fool. Every scene, after Scene I and before Scene XIV, in which the king is present, the Fool is present also (McLean). This leads one to believe that the absence of Cordelia has a unique role to play in the presence of the fool. One theory is that Lear needs someone to take care of him and so when Cordelia leaves the Fool appears, and when Cordelia appears the Fool leaves. I believe it is something similar, yet much deeper than this. I believe that the Fool is the anthropomorphization of the degenerative effects of love on Lear’s mind. Lear has done something which he feels is just, in exiling his youngest daughter. However his mind retains its love of her even after, and represents such fact through the Fool. Lear loves her so much that he cannot let her go, and so she lives on in his mind and his heart through the embodiment of the Fool which, as we have discussed, leads Lear into exponentially more degenerative states until he finally admits to himself that he was wrong to cast Cordelia out, and that she must love him after all; but by the time such an admission is made Lear has already gone mad from his despair over the lost love of his daughter and there is no getting him back.
A second prime example of the corruptive influence of love is the case of Othello, Branbantio, and Desdemona. Desdemona is Brabantio’s only child and he has raised and educated her to respect her place in the order of things, yet even with such engendered learnings spoiling her very blood she elopes with Othello. Brabantio loves his daughter dearly and when learning of her subtle marriage to the Moor he proclaims that his
[P]articular grief
Is of so flood-gate and o’er-bearing nature
That it engluts and swallows other sorrows,
And it is still itself.” (Othello 1.3.56-9).
‘Particular grief’ references the marriage and it causes Brabantio to experience an overwhelming sorrow ‘so flood-gate and o’er-bearing nature’. The sorrow he experiences is so cataclysmic, so monstrous that it could seemingly devour the sorrows of the world and yet not be any more sorrowful itself, it is the epitome of all sorrows and is as dense as a sorrow can possibly be. The sorrow of which no greater sorrow might be fathomed. This sorrow is a result of his broken heart, his defiled parental love for this girl, his daughter. He desires with all his heart, to keep her from Othello (1.3.193-4), that she might not become so estranged from his life and wishes for her that he may continue to love her as his own. But she has committed to loving the Moor and so she accepts the disavowal of her father (1.3.192) in order to be true to her husband (1.3.187-8). Consequentially Brabantio is slain by his sorrow:
[P]ure grief
Shore his old thread in twain (5.2.203-4).
The relationship of Desdemona and Othello seems to embody a most powerful bond, with which the two lovers would seem to proceed. Apparently not so strong however, as to prohibit Othello from believing she is a gallivanting strumpet the moment it is suggested to him that she has been acting curiously. Even before such discourse takes place Othello is frightened for her chastity: Iago, Othello’s devious ensign, simply shifts his own attitude to one of discomfort as he and Othello chat about Desdemona, and the Moor is suddenly aghast with inquiry as to the particulars of Iago’s unease (3.3.94-119). Iago has simply mentioned his disapproval of Cassio hanging out with Desdemona and of his departure, which falls short of addressing himself to the men, yet relentlessly does Othello attempt to drag convictions from his ensign’s mouth:
As if there [are] some monster in thy thought
Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something:
I heard thee say even now thou likedst not that,
When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like? (3.3.110-13).
In case your mind happened to read that last quote in a tone which connotes Othello’s defense of his wife’s honour, be assured otherwise when nine lines later Othello speaks:
I know thou’rt full of love and honesty [Iago],
And weigh’st thy words before thou giv’st them breath,
Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more- (3.3.122-24).
The man is practically shaking with distress! His mind has gone full-tilt before anything of merit has even been said. Othello is mad with love, and his madness of love allows his madness of jealousy. Love is the fault in his person which kites him, down along the path of dangerous possessiveness; ultimately resulting in his uncivilized termination of this poor girl’s life. Taking the life of Desdemona in such a barbaric manner as to smother her with a pillow amongst her wedding sheets, leads directly to his own suicide for having killed her (after he finds out that Iago has been plotting against him the entire time). The Moor of Venice hath been slain by the loss of a woman he so loved, a loss propagated by his own hand, out of a jealousy which love itself hath provided him; Othello is entirely consumed by the experience of love, ironically following neatly behind Brabantio on his course to the afterlife.
Love has been shown in these two instances to be a supreme force of utter degeneration and sabotage. If these two examples have anything to say about the fault of love within us then it is this: Love will override all faculties of reason and logic, and will cause one to become irrationally paranoid about rational situations, which will lead to a decay of one’s quality of life before finally taking that life from one. King Lear believed that an expression of love was the most honest way to determine one’s love for another and quickly discovered that the ability to ‘heave one’s heart into one’s mouth’ is a poor technique with which to gauge compassion and reverence. Lear was able to adjust this mistake later on, only to unknowingly coerce his one true daughter into a situation which resulted in her death, and also his own. Brabantio’s love for Desdemona, his darling daughter, led him directly to death when she exchanged his love for the love of her new husband Othello. That exchange proceeded to cause Othello to become hyperactively paranoid and draw untrue conclusions about her nature, leading him to kill her for rebuke of his love towards her. Then upon discovery that he had terminated the life of one who loved him so much as to brave his paranoia and fret, and realizing he now had to live with such a loss he was compelled to take his own life in an ironic love triangle between daughter, father, husband, and wife. Love is the betrayer of man and it is a vicious emotion to court, therefore to grant man the ability to not love would be a truly ultimate blessing as it would provide rational thought the room required to work, and consequently provide man with the room required to truly grow as a rational being. For “is not love of something, and of something too which is wanting to a man? . . . [Furthermore] the love of the beautiful set in order the empire of the gods, for that of deformed things there is no love . . . And if this is true, Love is the love of the beautiful and not of deformity . . . And the admission has been already made that Love is of something which a man wants and has not . . . Then love wants and has not beauty . . . And [you would not call] that beautiful which wants and has not beauty . . . [And] [i]s not the good also the beautiful? Yes. [Therefore] in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good” (Plato).
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Stanley Wells Ed. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press Inc.: New York, 2000. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. Michael Neill Ed. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press Inc.: New York, 2006. Print.
McLean, Ralph. “‘And My Poor Fool Is Hanged’ - The Double Role Of Cordelia And The Fool In
King Lear”. Britain in Print. N.d. Web. 27/11/2015. URL = http://www.britaininprint.net/shakespeare/study_tools/poor_fool_lear.html
Plato. “Symposium”. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive, N.d. Web. 23/11/2015. URL = http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html
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