1. Relationships in ‘King Lear’

2. Different types of relationships in ‘King
Lear’
• Father and daughters
• Brothers
• Sisters
• Mother and children
• Husband and wife
• Master and servant
• Lovers
• King and kingdom
• Legitimate and illegitimate children

3. AO4 – family in Shakespeare’s time
• Patriarchy –governed by father / eldest living male
• Primogeniture – exploited by Edmund’s fake letter
from Edmund; ‘the policy and reverence of age makes
the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our
fortunes from us til our oldness cannot relish them.’
• Dowries – secures husband and jointure
• Illegitimate children – excluded from inheritance and
primogeniture; Edmund ‘not a son by the order of law’
• Emotional bonds – bonds of love and duty alluded to
in Jacobean sermons, conduct books and the Bible
• Masters and servants – servants fully part of a
Renaissance household: Kent and the Fool

4. The ‘bond’
• ‘I love your majesty/ According to my bond, no more
no less.’ (Cordelia, 1.1)
• 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.’(Cordelia, 1.1)
• ‘the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father’ (Gloucester,
1.2)
• ‘the child was bound to the father’ (Edmund. 2.1)
• ‘thou better knowst/ The offices of nature, bond of
childhood,/ Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude.’
(Lear, 2.2)
• ‘but I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire…’ (Lear, 4.7)

5. Fathers and daughters
• ‘I loved her most, and thought to set my rest/ On her kind nursery.’
(1.1)
• ‘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.’
(Goneril, 1.3.4-6)
• Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous, when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster! (1.4)
• Visual emblem of kneeling – happens in 2.2.344 with Regan: ‘On my
knees I beg’ and 4.7.59 with Cordelia: ‘she restrains him as he tries to
kneel
• ‘…this tempest in my mind/Doth from my senses take all feeling
else,/ Save what beats there, filial ingratitude.’ (3.4.12-14)
• ‘aged father’s right’ (Cordelia, 4.4)

6. Edmund
• Now, gods, stand up for bastards. (1.2)
• This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we
are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour,
we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the
stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical
predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an
enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we
are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of
whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the
charge of a star! up for bastards! (1.2)
• ‘What you have charged me with, that I have done/ And
more, much more; the time will bring it out;/ Tis past and
so am I. ‘

7. Edmund: ungrateful child or
Renaissance self-fashioning?
• Narrative of ‘self-fashioning’ tricks the other characters (although it
is less clear in Lear the extent to which Edmund causes the key
downfalls; Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out because he helps Lear)
• Stephen Greenblatt calls moments like this ‘the improvisation of
power’ – authority is established in moments where order
(political, theological, sexual etc) is violated – like Marlowe’s heroes,
the renaissance self-fashioner seeks to shatter restraints. Esp.
compared to people like Kent with his selfless loyal service.
• His actions and behaviour allow us to feel little redemption –
betrayal of father with letter concerning French invasion, stolen
from his father causes Gloucester’s punishment.
• Noticeably, evidence given against his father shows a sanctimonious
lack of remorse and elsewhere in the play makes it hard to pity him
(and likewise, believe him when he is remorseful at the end). For
example, Act 3, sc5 ‘How malicious is my fortune, that I must
repent to be just?’ / ‘I will persevere in my course of loyalty,
though the conflict be sore between that and my blood.’

8. Edgar – significance of transformation?
‘How now brother Edmund, what
serious contemplation are you in?’ (1.2)
My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and
precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring
voices,
Strike in their numbed and mortified
bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of
rosemary.”
(2.2.180-185)
Let's exchange charity.
I am no less in blood than thou art,
Edmund;
If more, the more thou hast wrong'd me.
My name is Edgar, and thy father's son.
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he
got
Cost him his eyes.
(5.3)
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to
say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are
young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
(5.3)

9. The importance of the trial scene – 3.6
• Lear’s imaginings of hell-fire as a punishment for for Goneril and
Regan, blurs lines further between demonic/ powerful. (NB FOLIO
version doesn’t include the trial scene; see notes in text. Directors
generally love it)
• Edgar: ‘thou robed man of justice’ Fool: ‘yoke-fellow of equity’ –
truth in madness
• Edgar: ‘let us deal justly’ – true role in play, sharply contrasted with
nonsense verse that follows. Edgar/ fool interchangeable here; his
verse about shepherd and flock could be criticism of Lear though
(prompting the question – who is on trial here?)
• Trial interspersed with comic interlude of fool (I took you for a joint
stool – absurd) and Kent discussing Lear’s ‘patience’, or lack of here.
Lear still wants justice here for filial ingratitude- not quite reached
enlightenment/ realisation. This is re-enforced by borrowing of
Harsnett’s demonic language/ accounts of trials or exorcisms. The
hell is in his mind: ‘fire, corruption in the place’

10. Hard hearted father or justified
sinner?
• Lear : ‘Let them anatomize Regan; see what
breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
nature that make these hard hearts?’ – physically
hard; verb suggests breaking it up/ pulling apart
to discover cause.
• See Arden notes; some Lears stab/ gauge out
heart – in Gambon’s production, Lear accidentally
stabs the fool through a pillow and kills him.
Biblically, hardness of heart is a punishment for
the wicked. > Does Lear have a hard heart?

11. Sins of the fathers?
• 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.’(Cordelia, 1.1)
• ‘Yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter,/
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,/ Which I
needs must call mine. Thou art a boil,/ A plague
sore or embossed carbuncle/ In my corrupted
blood.’(2.2)
• ‘Some good I mean to do despite mine own
nature’ (Edmund, 5.2)

12. Bonds beyond the embodiment of a moral
virtue or truth – sons/daughters as real
people
• ‘What is important to Gloucester is not insight
but a relationship which the only possible
metaphor is physical contact.’ (Paul Alpers)
• ‘Might I live to see thee in my touch/ I’d say I
had eyes again.’ (Gloucester)
• ‘Look upon me, Sir.’ (Cordelia)
• ‘For as I am a man, I think this lady be my
child, Cordelia’ (Lear)

13. Sample essay questions
• By exploring the dramatic presentation of
parents and children, evaluate the view that
‘neither parents nor children can escape the
consequences of each other’s actions.’
• By exploring the dramatic presentation of family
relationships, evaluate the view that ‘the
breakdown of relationships is to blame for the
chaotic events King Lear.’
• ‘According to my bond/ No more, no less.’ By
exploring the dramatic presentation of family
bonds in King Lear, evaluate this view.