The Tragedy of King Lear Analysis Essay -- King Lear Shakespeare Essay

The Tragedy of King Lear outlineLear By Jupiter, I blaspheme noKent By Juno, I swear ay. In The Tragedy of King Lear, particularly in the first fractional of the play, Lear continually swears to the gods. He invokes them for mercies and begs them for destruction he binds both his lads and his curses with their names. The older charactersLear and Gloucester persist view their world as strictly within the moral fashion model of the pagan religion. As Lear expresses it, the central core of his religion lies in the cerebration of earthly justice. In II.4.14-15, Lear expresses his disbelief that Regan and Albany would have put the mantled Kent, his messenger, in stocks. He at first attempts to deny the rather obvious fact in front of him, objecting No twice before bane it. By the time Lear invokes the king of the pagan gods, his refusal to believe has become self-willed and almost absurd. Kent replies, non without sarcasm, by affixing the name of the queen of the gods to a mutually exclusive statement. The nisusula is turned into nonsense by its repetition. In contradicting Lears oath as well as the assertion with which it is coupled, Kent is subtly challenging Lears conception of the universe as controlled by just gods. He is overly and perhaps more importantly, challenging Lears race with the gods. It is Kent who most limpidly and repeatedly opposes the ideas put forth by Lear his actions as well as his statements undermine Lears hypotheses about divine order. Lear does not find his bollocks in youth unless in middle age not in the opposite excess of his ownEdmunds calculation, say merely in Kents comparative moderation. Likewise the viable alternative to his relationship to divine justice is not shown by Edmund with his ... ...wo of them as Gods spies (Lear, V.3.17). This is the first time that Lear refers to God rather than a god or gods. In this metaphor, he and Cordelia are Gods employees and dependents rather than a necessary p art of a natural order. He does not form his divine reference as an oath he neither commands nor supplicates. It is a sweet vision and a sharp contrast to Lears early invocations of the gods. Were there some divine preceptor bent on program line Lear an earthly lesson, he could safely say that it was learnt. But the play, of course, continues. What is important, finally, is not that Lear learns, but that we the audience learn. One of the most important aspects of this learning is anticipated by Kent, who first points out that any invocation of Jupiter can be countered by an opposite invocation of Juno to the same effect, which is to say none at all.