Lear

I haven’t finished the entire play yet, but I’m assuming that this will play a big factor in how it all ends: Of Lear’s three daughters Cordelia seems to have a creepy kind of love for her father that surpasses the others. Both Regan and Goneril profess their love for their father in long-winded, gushing speeches, like “A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable,” to which Cordelia responds snidely in asides “Love, and be silent.” There is some sort of competition as to which one of them loves King Lear the most. Cordelia, with that creepy kind of love, says she will never get married like her sisters, and instead will give all her love to her father. “Why have my sisters husbands, if they say / They love you 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.”

This seems primed for a negative feminist critique, but it also comes off a bit post-colonial. The overlapping of these two “schools” is a sense of servitude and inferiority. The women are supposed to appease the men, and the colonized appease the colonizer.

Then Kent enters and refers to Lear as his father as well, so it may just be that he is the King; that the King is the one who receives all the praise. But why? Because he is the one in power – post-colonialism – but he is in this power because of the system that is in place. This is far from communism, Marx wouldn’t be too happy with sucking up to Lear. He would have rather liked the way Kent got under Lear’s skin.

So, I can see a way to look at Lear from each of the different schools we studied. And, I think that’s because it is possible to do this with anything, any t.v. show, movie, novel, play, whatever. There is always going to be a way to look at things from a particular angle if you try. I think that looking at works in this way allows you to see things in a perspective you may not have before, or not wanted or had interest to. At some point it agitates me though.