If a Shakespearean comedy focuses on the consummation of love, a tragedy's concern is the opposite, as Harold Bloom expresses:
[The] powerful representation of love askew, thwarted, misunderstood, or turned to hatred or icy indifference..can become an uncanny aesthetic value.
This article cites four instances where this quotation is significant in the play:
Cordelia’s Love for Lear
The conflict begins when Cordelia is unable to "heave [her] heart into [her] mouth" and although her love for Lear is true, she is unable to verbalise it. Lear’s mistake is that despite knowing Cordelia’s love for him, he refuses to acknowledge or reciprocate it, banishing her for her silence.
Marjorie Garber has identified Cordelia’s inability to express her love as "the rhetoric of silence", where the limitations of language to express heighten dramatic tension, in the way her silence is tragically and "radically misunderstood".
Cordelia does overcome her silence by the time she is united with Lear, and calls out to him: "Oh my dear father, let restoration hang/thy medicine on my lips", and the image of her lips finally achieving expression is a beautiful, hopeful moment. Nevertheless, tragedy looms over the both of them, and the final moments of the play overcomes and crushing their love.
Lear’s Misappropriation of Love
Lear’s mistake results in him being denied the love of the faithful Cordelia, but the source of his anger and madness derive from the harm his other two daughters, Regan and Goneril, inflict upon him, as they repay his hopes for their love with wickedness. Love is the bedrock of King Lear's suffering, and a key to understanding the play as Shakespeare’s "perfection in poetics of outrage." (Bloom)
Edgar’s Love for Gloucester
In the parallel storyline of Gloucester, love is seen in Edgar’s care for his father under disguise. Garber observes the image of the hand, which Edgar offers to Gloucester to lead him, as an "emblem of humanity" and sign of kinship and love.
This is best shown in the episode where Edgar saves the blind Gloucester from committing suicide, tricking him that to believing he has jumped off the Dover cliffs, though in reality he has merely jumped on a flat plain. Edgar’s saving of Gloucester’s physical life is accompanied by a lifting of his spirits, and draws allusion to a Christian resurrection:
Therefore, thou happy father
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men’s impossibilies, have preserved thee.
At this juncture sheds his old persona of Tom that Gloucester now identifies as as a ‘fiend’, and adopts the disguise of a new character who is stronger, more mentally stable who addresses Gloucester as ‘father’. Edgar moves closer to Gloucester in this manner.
Nevertheless, there are disturbing aspects in Edgar’s expression of love. For unknown reasons, Edgar never resolves the dramatic tension in his disguises by revealing his true identity and securing the original father-son bond that his bastard brother, Edmond, destroyed. Instead, the moment where he identifies himself is cut from the stage, only being obliquely referred in the final scene. Gloucester’s reaction, in how his damaged heart "Burst smilingly", enforces the sense that love here, like the rest of the play, reaches no fruition.
Edmond’s Coldness in Love
From his entrance, Edmond focuses only on a hunger for power: "Edmond the base/Shall to th’legitimate. I grow, I prosper." His sentences are clipped, factual and emotionless, and parallel the methodical manner he wrecks Gloucester’s and Edgar’s lives without a shred of guilt.
For Edmond, love is impossible, given his coldness and lack of emotion. In a soliloquy, he wonders whether he should accept Goneril or Regan’s love: "Both?-one?-or neither? Neither can be enjoyed/If both remain alive", revealing an apathy which is an ironic contrast to the sister’s passions and contest for his love in various conniving and poisonous means which finally end in mutual murder and death.
Edmond is a character that is, "amazingly free of all connection"(Bloom) to any character, and is important, thematically and dramatically, as an antithesis to love and emotion in the play.
King Lear focuses on the Sundering of Love
The play moves to an end where bonds of affection are sundered, the finale bloody, and the future bleak. In King Lear, the focus is not on love as a new hope or mode to convey meaning, but in its rendering. Shakespeare has left us a play which, in Harold Bloom’s words, serves to "Express love at its darkest, its most unacceptable, yet also at its most inevitable."
Bibliography:
The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus
(Text is quoted from The Tragedy of King Lear)
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom
Shakespeare after All by Marjorie Garber
Shakespeare by Mark Van Doren
Jing Heng Fong - I'm starting university this year, and look forward to writing and gaining experience at Suite.
