On The Complexities of Love in King Lear
I feel the ultimate stone upon which the story of Lear grinds is Love. Love sharpens the sting of Cordelia’s estrangement as it hones the cold edge of her sisters’ ambition. Love seems to me the hinge-point of madness in the work. To get right down to it, my question is broadly this: How does Love influence the players in Lear, and does that point to Its nature? I hope to further narrow that question as I explore the complex relationships in the work.
The play opens, interestingly, upon the subplot of the whole tale and not upon its
eponymous mad king. No, we stumble upon a threesome of his subjects in Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund in private conversation. It starts as the gossip of state, but quickly turns to focus on Edmund, the least talkative of the group who is also Gloucester’s illegitimate son. We find out later that this grates at Edmund , and who can blame him? Gloucester himself admits that1 though Edmund was once an embarrassment , he is now “no dearer in [Gloucester’s] account”2 than the legitimate son Edgar. Striking to me is this: paternal affection needs not the bonds of3 matrimony, but love does not come from Gloucester. No, it is Kent who first mentions it once
introduced to Edmund:
“Kent: I must love you and sue to know you better.
Edmund: Sir, I shall study deserving."4
Gloucester doesn’t specify just how he feels toward either son. In fact, he shows no real
affection to Edmund, speaking about him as if he weren’t there. Kent is the first character in the play to use the word love, and Edmund presents the first complexity of it: that of deserving love.
The deservedness of love is a running theme in this play. King Lear divides up his
kingdom on this basis:
“Lear: Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom, and ’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths…
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge”5
Lear obviously believes he deserves the love of his daughters, though Shakespeare doesn’t treat us to any early familial insights. We are dropped into the middle of the end of Lear’s life, and know nothing of his relationship with his progeny. Edmund’s quip about deserving love seems carried out by Cordelia. After Regan and Goneril profess their affection for their father , Cordelia remains silent. “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent”6 is her thought, and silent she remains.
What her sisters spoke7 outwardly, Cordelia says not at all. In answer to her father’s ire at her silence, yet recognizes that love does go to those deserving of it. Lear has Cordelia’s love because he is her father and provided the comforts of life to her , but she also knows that her yet-unknown husband will8 have need of her love. She points out that her sisters’ proclamations of undying love to their dying father are out of place, and perhaps inappropriate:
“Cordelia: 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.”9
To those familiar with Pauline writings, this is an interesting take on the idea that men should love their wife as their own person, and more so even than father and mother. This in contrast10 with what Cordelia proposes, that a faithful daughter is to divide herself between parent and spouse, as both seem to have claim on her love. This deservedness stems from the care of a father in upbringing, and that the husband “[her] plight shall carry.”11 Cordelia notes, and I have to wonder if in it denounces, her sister’s marriages are not one to which she aspires for they do not have love for their husbands by their own admission.
Cordelia typifies the truest of loves in King Lear. She alone seems to have the love for
her father he so desires, even though he banishes her for it. She returns to save her father by invading from France, and this is perhaps the biggest evidence of the second complexity: loving returns. Edmund frames Edgar for conspiring to usurp his father’s position.12 He later causes Edgar to go into hiding, but the important bit is that Edgar returns to the father who thinks him a conspiring villain.13 In Scene 6, he saves Gloucester much like Cordelia who returns to free her father from her sisters though Lear banished her and married her off to the King of France. He doesn’t benefit from the recognition of his father, however, as does Cordelia. This recognition seems to seal the return in love for Cordelia as it doesn’t for Edgar. Gloucester spends a good deal of time with his own son without recognizing him. This is especially strange as he recognizes Lear immediately upon simply hearing the King’s voice.14
This love of child for parent seems problematic in one chief respect as touching
Cordelia: if her love is to be split between both her father and her husband, how does going to war and losing, wasting her adoptive country’s resources in the process, show an egalitarian love for husband and father? It does seem that love is not a simple equation of positive and negative values, but rather more complex even than Cordelia first surmised. Perhaps this affection of child to parent is of a different sort, and not of the same well from which amorous love springs? In fact, we do not see Cordelia’s husband at all through the end of the play, and Cordelia leads the French forces in combat against her sisters. In this way her comportment is very much opposite the Christian teaching of leaving father and mother to cleave to spouse, leaving the one to return to her father.15
Perhaps most perplexing to me is Cordelia’s reticence to speak in love to her father at
any length at all. It seems words are cheap where love and its expression are concerned, while promises and contracts are not binding either morally or otherwise. Evidence enough are Regan and Goneril in their comportment both to their father and husbands, choosing to set aside both for the more ambitious and perhaps more sensual Edmund.16 These two sisters exemplify the duplicitous nature of words, and I can’t help but feel they held little affection for Edmund as well, seeing as they kill each other. And death is that ultimate price for which lovers of self, father, or power pay. All who
were mixed up in the affair of love suffer that final end, leaving only Kent and Edgar to carry on the shadow of what is left of the kingdom and family. It is ironic that Lear’s entire line is destroyed, starting with this game of love and ending with his oldest daughters killing each other and his youngest hanged for treachery. Lear himself dies holding Cordelia, the one he banished. Poetically, the only two who remain are those who first mentioned love in the beginning of the play. Kent, who first sought to love Edmund better, and Edgar, who proved ultimately deserving of it.
Endnotes:
1.2.2-19 Edmund here gives his whole motive in exposition. He resents being a year or so younger than Edgar, and cannot abide his own status as bastard as compared to his brother’s legitimacy.
2 1.1.10-11
3 ibid. 19-21
4. 1.1.30-31
5. 1.1.39-58
6. 1.60-67, 76-84; Here it is worth noting that neither Regan nor Goneril intend to follow Lear’s wishes, chief of which is to be cared for as he goes the way of all mortals. They present flowery speeches and say out loud what Cordelia only thinks in aside, that words do no justice to the love of daughter to father. This foilsome love causes me to doubt their later forays into future romantic avenues with Edmund.
7. 1.1.68
8. 1.1.105-108
9. ibid. 109-115
10. Ephesians 5:28-31
11. 1.1.111
12. 1.2.49-80
13 2.1.29-35
14 4.6.114, 125-126
15 Mark 10:8-9
16 5.3.270-271