It’s All in the Family

When we are born, we cry that we are come/ To this great stage of fools

-King Lear Act 4 Scene 6

            William Shakespeare, forever read and admired and forever unnecessarily dreaded in high schools, approached writing similarly to many other literary geniuses, but his works rise above the rest in their timelessness.  Shakespeare describes common life experiences through dramas, and he never avoids the questions that confuse and discourage our finite minds.  Shakespeare understands deeply and intimately the pain that makes up the human experience, and he knows better than anyone else how to portray the experiences that we do not dare try to put into words. In his plays, we read stories of betrayal, conflict, and untimely deaths, the very experiences that pierce us deeply and leave hurt buried inside our souls. 

            Unfortunately, we often extract the poignancy from his genius when we categorize his works as tragedies and comedies, outlining their structure and dissecting their parts.  Who are we to give labels to his vivid replications of our own lives?  The labels remove the reality from his plays so that we see his works as literary devices and strategies, not reflections of ourselves.  If we could look more deeply into his works, we would see their power not only as stories about fictional people, but as stories that mirror our own lives. 

            From his willingness to explore senseless pain, Shakespeare understands something more deeply than any other author in history.  He understands the excruciating pain and joy that make up the family unit and how family contributes to our tragedy.  He brings to life the fears deeply buried in all of us that relate to our most carefully guarded secrets.  His work with the family embodies Alexander Pope’s idea of poetry as “What oft was thought but ne’er so well Exprest.”  His plays attempt to unbury the confusion in our souls accumulated from the tragedy of our experiences.  The betrayal of children, the cyclical return to childhood for the elderly, and the madness of family members are kept hidden from view in our own lives, but Shakespeare writes unashamedly about these very occurrences.  The family is a creation so intricately constructed yet so prone to unrest, and Shakespeare captures its intense beauty and pain. 

            Whether we will admit it or not, our families are the center of our lives.  We joke about our crazy parents and our drug addict cousin Nellie, pretending it doesn’t hurt, that it doesn’t tear us apart.  We run from the messiness that is family, escape to college and escape to work, but they call us back, call us home.  Our hearts ache for that place that is the center of joy and sorrow, the only place in the world where we are known.  So many scars are exposed, mistakes unhidden and unaffected by our fake, worldly identities.  Into these complicated depths of ourselves Shakespeare beckons us.

            Before looking at the family in Shakespeare’s King Lear, it is important to understand the significance of the family bond in Shakespeare’s time.  Common traditions such as the parental blessing ritual and courtship, betrothal and inheritance customs are often lost on modern readers who read from a much more individualistic background.  In Shakespeare’s time, however, the family bond was sacred and a person’s family determined the trajectory of his/her life (Young).  The common blessing ritual shows the significance of the bond.  Morning and night, the children would kneel before their parents and ask for a blessing.  The parents would then call to Heaven, asking for blessings on their child.  This ritual symbolized the respect and obedience with which children related to their parents.  Also, in Shakespeare’s age, the father was the ultimate and unquestionable head of the household, whether tyrannical or loving.  Finally, this cultural respect for the parents also meant children were required by Elizabethan law to care for their parents in old age (Young).  Having these family characteristics as a background helps us view Shakespeare’s works and the meaning behind them more clearly.

            One of Shakespeare’s most intimately woven and frighteningly real subjects is his treatment of the family unit, and often his plays center around events that happen when something in a family goes terribly wrong.  In Hamlet, Hamlet is avenging the murder of his father by his uncle who married his mother, displaying some very complicated family dynamics.  In Romeo and Juliet, the action springs from family rivalries.  Here Shakespeare portrays the power of a family’s honor and loyalty, common family characteristics in that culture.  In light of this family attribute of his works and the cultural significance of the family unit, perhaps one of the most troubling scenarios that Shakespeare brings to life is the betrayal of family members. 

            In King Lear, the most unfortunate series of events is set in motion by an initial familial conflict.  Lear, an aging king, must decide how to divide his kingdom among his three daughters.  He asks his daughters to speak of their love for him individually in order to help him decide how to divide the kingdom.  One daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play his childish game.  Cordelia says, “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth.  I love Your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less” (I.I.88-90).  This opening scene of stubborn pride from both Cordelia and her father sparks the destruction of that familial bond, and from their conflict the action of the play begins.  Merideth Skura explains the treatment of family in King Lear in her article, “Dragon Fathers and Unnatural Children: Warring Generations in King Lear and Its Sources.”  She says, 

            The mutual destruction in Shakespeare's play is psychologically and             painfully realistic […] Lear's childish self-centeredness smothers Cordelia;             her youthful declaration of independence tears him apart and drives him             mad. The pity and terror elicited from audiences come from watching fathers             and children attack, humiliate, and abandon each other (123).

Lear is a flawed, human father, but he is also victimized when his other two daughters turn against him.  Goneril and Regan both profess their love to him in gushing words, only to turn their backs on him later.  They abuse their aging father, taking from him everything he possessed.  They manipulate him, refusing even to give him knights and kicking him out of the castle during a bad storm.  Lear is heartbroken, and he eventually goes mad.  He says of his daughters’ betrayal, “The daughters’ ingratitude is like violence of one part of the body against another: “Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to’t?” (III.IV.15-16).                       

            In the same play, another familial plot occurs between the nobleman Gloucester and his bastard child, Edmund. Gloucester, a well-respected nobleman, reveals at the beginning of the play that he fathered a bastard child who of whom he is ashamed.  Edmund, jealous of his legitimate brother Edgar, devises a plan to trick his father into believing that his Edgar is going to usurp the estate.  Gloucester believes the lie, severing the strong relationship with Edgar.  These breaks in family loyalty are heartbreaking and striking.  The horrible tragedy that occurs at the end of the play tears us more deeply because of the severance of important familial relationships.

            Paired with the fractured relationships with their children, both Lear and Gloucester are aging men, losing their authority in the world as well as in their own families.  Shakespeare’s treatment of old age shows an understanding of the phenomenon that everyone experiences.  He raises the question that we often avoid until the end of our lives.  What is the point of life if we are to return to dust?  Lear, once a powerful king, has been reduced by old age to a physically weak, mentally ill, lonely man.  Gloucester’s blindness and his suicide attempt convince us of the hopelessness of his future.  Shakespeare is showing us our futures and the futures of those we love in the lives of these aging men.

            The elderly return in a cyclical way to be as they were as babies, unable to provide for themselves the most basic of needs.  The cycle takes an active, productive human life and renders it suddenly useless and helpless.  The elderly sit in wheelchairs staring into space.  If they are lucky enough to remain cognitively aware, they may spend their days on puzzles or watching television.  They are no longer able to provide for themselves, becoming a burden to their children and relatives.  The life that was so full and purposeful so quickly is depleted of its meaning.  All the endeavors that a person has given himself or herself to suddenly mean nothing as they are tucked away in a room of some facility, where they barely see the world or the sunlight.  Walking the halls of a nursing home, it is common to see short biographies on residents’ doors.  The stories tell of the accomplishments of their lives.  One was an astronaut, one was a brilliant teacher, one gave his life as a doctor working overseas in impoverished neighborhoods.  And now they sit, watching television, with only a plaque on the door to remember their life. 

            Walking the halls of the nursing home where I worked in high school, it was common to hear people yelling from their rooms, have a hand reach out and grab mine with a death grip, and to breathe in unpleasant odors resulting from uncontrollable bowels.  Martha talked in gibberish, Maxine sang unrecognizable songs from her childhood, diabetic Betty stole cookies from the fridge, Lucy sat smiling in her wheelchair, cognitively aware and yet unable to communicate after suffering from a stroke.  Fred was wheeled off to his daily dialysis appointment and Agnes received her pills in a spoonful of pudding.  Some residents had visitors every day while others had no one.  Some talked fondly of their families while others eyes clouded over with the hurt and pain of severed relationships.

            Like many of these people, Lear has had great success and many friends and accomplishments in his life, but from Cordelia’s initial act of rebellion, one by one Lear loses his friends and family until he is left alone on the heath with only his Fool and Poor Tom as company (Collington).  He descends rapidly into depression and madness as his success is stripped away and the cycle of life reaches him at last.  Drenched and wandering through the tempest, Lear prays, ““You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!/  You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,/ As full of grief as age, wretched in both” (II.IV.268-271).  As the storm continues, Lear sinks deeper and deeper into madness, losing his sense of reality.

            Shakespeare uses madness not as a comical occurrence, but as a realistic portrayal of the end of life, knowing that his audiences know mental illness, amnesia, and physical suffering.  Shakespeare knows that they have family members who are mentally struggling and that there has been great tragedy in their families.  Lear sinks deep into depression and eventual madness after his two daughters, Goneril and Regan, turn him out of the castle and into a nasty storm.  As he wanders through the rain and wind, he at first has a sense of reality.  He speaks of his age, his daughters’ cruelty, and the injustice of his current circumstances.  However, he begins to lose his senses, talking of the “tempest in [his] mind” (III.IV.13-14).  Shakespeare paints the picture of the terrible storm as a symbol of not only the political storm, but the storm raging in Lear’s mind after he has suffered from these severed relationships with his children.

            Lear’s struggles would have come anyway with aging, but the severed family relationships make the end of his life so much harder.  It seems that one can handle the challenges one faces with a support system and a family to lean on, but facing old age and death alone is very frightening.  When I worked at the nursing home, the most troubling to me of all the old age was a man named Bill.  He suffered from muscular dystrophy and was actually only forty years old.  He lived in a place that smelled of death.  Of course, no one would advertise a nursing home that way, but really, people moved out of this Earth every day in those rooms.  Bill stayed.  He stayed for twenty long years.  He lived alongside mental illness, physical decay, and hopeless lives.   

            The sadness that one felt upon meeting and spending time with Bill was not only based on his physical condition.  Many people suffer disabilities and yet lead joyful and meaningful lives.  The heart-wrenching part about Bill’s life was the desertion of his parents and family, the failure of the family unit.  His parents only managed to visit every few months.  Bill spoke with bitterness whenever he was asked about them.  Bill needed his family, and they had deserted him. 

            Our family is the crux of our support, but in an instant it can become the crux of our deepest pain.  In a society that is becoming more and more individualistic, we are losing something of great value.  Yes, families often fail and often fall apart, but maybe this happens because we do not place value on those relationships, and then we wonder what went wrong when they fail.  Most things that are worth anything encompass both joy and sorrow, and the family unit is one of those things that we cannot lose.  Our families are flawed.  They will fail.  But those relationships are worth the pain. 

            That is why it is so relieving when Lear and Cordelia reconcile their relationship at the end of the drama.  There is a sense of peace and rightness that overcomes all the bad things that have happened.  The ending is far from happy; the audience shudders as Cordelia takes her last breath and Lear falls dead on top of her in his grief.  However, there is a sense of closure knowing that they died together, reconciled and full of love for one another.  In the same way, Gloucester’s death is sweetened by his joy at the revelation of his son Edgar, who he learns is alive. 

            Shakespeare asks us to take a good look at our disabled world.  It is a world where pain and sorrow abound, where daughters turn their backs on an aging father, and where illegitimate sons trick their fathers into hating their brother.  Cordelia speaks of the inevitable injustice, saying to her father as they are taken away to prison, “We are not the first/ Who with best meaning have incurred the worst” (V.III.3-4).  It is our ability to grapple with the tough questions that will lead to more maturity (if less understanding).  None of us can change the brokenness of the world, but we can choose what to do with it in our own minds and with our actions.  In King Lear, Shakespeare deliberately illustrates tragedy in the context of family because his audience would have understood the pain he was trying to portray.  He challenges us to think about the tragedy in our own lives and face the realities of the world in which we live.

Works Cited

Collington, Phillip D. “Self-Discovery in Montaigne's ‘Of Solitarinesse’ and King             Lear.” Comparative Drama 35.3, 4 (2001-02): 247-269. Web. 13 April 2013.

Skura, Merideth. “Dragon Fathers and Unnatural Children: Warring Generations in             King Lear and Its Sources.” Comparative Drama. 42.2 (2008): 121-148. Web.             13 April 2013.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. Print.

Young, Bruce W. Family Life in the Age of Shakespeare. Westport: Greenwood Press,             2009. Print.