The conflicting ideologies at work in King Lear
Renaissance drama, King Lear is composed at a time of artistic, theological, political, cultural, and aesthetic turmoil in the medieval world and in the emerging spirit of humanism. The old world was outdated and the new spirit had swept over Europe. Shakespeare captures the essence of the story with conflict, but King Lear is a wonder of construction and maybe the most powerful of all his stories. Several plays depict rivals in love or conflict, while others depict quarrels inside families — brother against brother, parent against kid — or between families. International conflicts ‘wars toward foreigners’ and domestic conflicts both exist as ‘civil wars’.
Shakespeare’s plays, however, have a deeper level of tension: There is conflict between generations, struggle between different philosophies and ideologies, the conflict between classes, conflict between races, and, at the center of it all, conflict between darkness and light, good and evil. Shakespeare is an accomplished dramatist if conflict is what drama is. Drama has evolved to symbolize ‘a play’ or ‘the action of a play.’ So the most important aspect of a play is conflict, and it is this that keeps the audience engaged. King Lear, Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, portrays conflict throughout and is an excellent topic to comprehend the plot, moreover it portrays the tension between those who agree to accept society’s natural order and others who opportunistically plan to establish their own ideals and order over what they consider to be the ‘plague of custom.’ Throughout the play, Shakespeare creates and expands on conflict in characters like Lear, Cordelia, Regan, Goneril, and between Gloucester and Edmund.
Gloucester has two sons: Edgar, the legal son who is heir to his father’s estates and titles, and Edmund, the illegitimate son who is entitled to nothing more than his father’s natural love if his father so desires. That is exactly what Gloucester does. Gloucester’s relationship with his sons’ moms reveals two distinct universes. Conflict is expressed throughout the play by Gloucester and Edmund, father and son. Edmund has forged a fake letter of the man-made intentions to kill his father Gloucester which is written harmfully by his half-brother Edgar. Gloucester’s fight with his cunning son helps King Lear by providing a parallel to Lear’s own troubles with his daughters. Lear is in the same scenario with his two daughters, Regan and Goneril, who both plot to betray their father in the expectation of profiting from his absence of power. The similarity between Lear’s daughters and Edmund serves to heighten the reader’s awareness of the tensions that the ambition for more power can create. The evil sisters Regan and Goneril form conflicts between those who accept the natural society and others who seek to place their own ideals and order against what they see to be the ‘plague of custom’. Shakespeare portrayed Goneril and Regan as lacking the respect or honor to be faithful to their husbands. Conflict occurs as the plot’s literal cause of death for both Regan and Goneril. Goneril poisons Regan as a result of the conflict; her sister Goneril subsequently kills herself after confessing to murdering her sister.
Lear and Regan, Goneril and Edmund Party are not only a battle between good and wicked people; they also express a societal message which arises from Shakespeare’s understanding of contemporary historical circumstances. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s dramatic interpretation of the deeper factors in King Lear is neither straightforward nor direct, and the Marxist critic who aspires to do more than essentially declare his own sympathies must evaluate his methods of analysis to deal with the nuances of Shakespeare’s dramatic interpretation of the deeper factors. A key problem in Lear comes from his time: not in Shakespeare’s England, but in an archaic pre-Christian sphere, which combines history and legend.
The interpretation of King Lear is firmly ideological. It aims to explain in ideological terms the form, evolution, meaning, and importance of the play as a whole in its formal integrity, and its premise is straightforward: King Lear depicts a revolution in which feudalism’s cosmology, politics, and morals, that the play nostalgically idealises, are displaced by the capitalist politics and ethics, which the play unacceptably idealises and which tend to shape contemporary civilization. John F. Danby demonstrated how the main doctrines of the two political philosophers most commonly associated with Britain’s feudal history and proletarian future can also clarify the ideology of nature, ecclesiastical and secular politics, and professional morality of the play’s main characters in their central conflict. In the ideological structure of his dramatic development, Shakespeare aligns Cordelia, Kent, and Cornwall’s servant with the notable author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity as significant figures of mutual fealty in a centralised universe where family and government mirror each other and people are predisposed by nature to undertake a redeeming corporate existence. He associates Edmund, the sisters, and Cornwall with the soon-to-be author of Leviathan as proponents of particular link in a levelled, competitive universe prior to family and state, in which people are predisposed by nature to pursue an invidious individual existence. And he made Lear a father to both viewpoints in his strife and anguish.
Several critics argue that the play doesn’t really entirely succeed in presentation, but that it is the clear intellectual and poetic winner. They contend that, unlike other plays with a main storyline and one or more subplots, King Lear has two major plots, and as a result, can neither fully engage the public, whose attention and involvement is fractured. It may be true, but it is also Shakespeare’s most cohesive play, with the characters, the action, the ideas, and the visuals all working in unison as a single entity. Yet again, conflict is central to the plot. The different conflicts in this drama are united and multi-layered. Seemingly, King Lear is a domestic, family drama about two intertwined households. The fundamental conflict is generational, involving Lear and his daughters in one drama and Gloucester and his sons in the other. So, beyond the personal, we have a more global generational clash — the elder generation versus the younger generation.
Cited Works
Shakespeare, William,. ‘King Lear’ The history of King Lear 1564‒1616 ed, by Stanley Wells.
