Final Thoughts on "Lear"

Before I dig into Antony & Cleo, I thought I'd get this Lear business wrapped up.

My secondary reading for this class is Frye's On Shakespeare book, which has a lot of fascinating things to say about King Lear, some of which was covered in class. Specifically, the recurrence of the words "nothing", "nature", and "fool". I found the concept of nature to be very interesting... or for this occasion we'll give it a capital "N".

Lear takes place in pre-Christian times, as we know, but the concept of Nature having a tiered structure is a very compelling one that places a lot of Christian/mythic dimension to the story. As Frye described Nature, it has four levels:
1. Heaven (or wherever God lives), represented by the sun and moon (and the stars, perhaps? Such as Edmund's contemplation of his "baseness" to the stars)
2. "Unfallen" Nature (such as the Garden of Eden)
3. "Fallen" Nature (in which animals survive well enough while humans struggle)
4. The demonic world (which may represent itself in the vile elements of Nature, such as the storm in the play)

Taking into account the notion of "displaced myth", Frye goes deeper in describing what the world of Lear is like... There is no God or gods but only occasionally deified representations, the "unfallen" Nature exists only in the goodness of select characters, the "Fallen" existence of men renders them animals, and that the "hellish" elements are found in the madness of Lear. It's an incredibly grim, bleak world indeed.

Reading King Lear comes as a bit of a shock considering that the three previous plays we have examined are comedies, and rather light-hearted ones. The Green World of A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It is nowhere to be found. The very idea of it seems like it's just a very foggy notion, an absolute impossibility. The only remnants of it, found in the love of Cordelia or the loyalty of Kent, are not realized or embraced until the devastation has already taken place. Even so, the love that he has for Cordelia and the reason behind it is really just "nothing", or at least it exists for no real reason, as Frye explains. It's an interesting and disturbing thought--a world of a fallen, animalistic experience that sends Lear spiraling into madness, and even the scarce love that he can find, however sincere it is, exists for no reason... perhaps that's what consumes Lear. The idea of "nothing".