Betrayal of the Senses in King Lear

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the play opens as the aging King decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. He looks for reassurance of their love and devotion for him by deceptive means of flattery, asking them to proclaim their love to him aloud. His eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, have no problem flattering their father to ensure their inheritance. Cordelia, on the other hand, speaks these words to her father upon his request: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/According to my bond; no more nor less” (Shakespeare 1.1.90–92). This apparent refusal to tell her father how much she loves him enrages Lear who favors his youngest daughter and cannot understand her defiance; however, it is these very words that in end verify Cordelia’s sincerity over her sisters, proving that the true physiology of love cannot simply be seen and heard, it must be proven by action.

While the words Cordelia speaks to her father might at first seem confusing, it is precisely this misperception that becomes a dominant theme in the play. Senses and words become a means of deception on part of the characters that attempt to fool their fathers, which happens to both elderly men, King Lear and the respectable Gloucester. Madness ensues for King Lear when he can no longer rely on his senses, and yet it was his reliance on sensory evidence that betrayed him in the first place. Goneril and Regan falsely expressed their love for Lear to hear, only to betray him later on. Cordelia who refused to put her love for her father into words of flattery is his only child who gives up everything to prove her devotion to him.

The simultaneous betrayal of Gloucester by his son Edmund is also wrapped up in false sensory details. It is Gloucester who actually goes blind in the play, but the plight of these two men is induced by their blindness to the truth from the very opening of the play. The confusion of Gloucester and Lear who are being fooled by their children becomes insanity when their senses fail them. Their reliance on outward appearance and perception is what leads to their demise. The reliance on the senses in the play brings about the larger theme of the search for justice and evidence, which becomes spiraled out of control by Cordelia’s words early on. The plain truth is not enough for Lear to believe and his false act of justice to divide the Kingdom evenly among his three daughters becomes another question of fairness in the play.

What happens to the good people in the play--mainly Cordelia, Lear, and Gloucester--proves a lack of real justice or fairness in King Lear. The chaos that ensues from Cordelia’s honesty spoken at the beginning of the play is a sign that King Lear cannot see or hear the truth and so he looks too false gestures and clings to what he believes is tangible. Clearly the most important things in this play are not seen or heard but inferred by comparison to what is fake and untrue. Lear’s insanity that comes upon him while he wanders the heath suggests that his grip on reality was so far off that now he has nothing left to hold on to, as he has banished his only loyal daughter from his kingdom and being led by a fool.

King Lear is a play very much about the senses and about the perception of situations and circumstances that are not what they might seem; in fact, often the opposite proves to be the truth. Although Cordelia is the youngest, she is the wisest. While it seems she defies her father’s command to speak her love to him, she is actually protecting her integrity and his by refusing to “heave her heart into her mouth,” as her wicked sisters endeavor to do. In Lear’s attempt to fairly distribute his kingdom among his three daughters to ensure order and fairness in his family and his kingdom, he ends up banishing the only faithful one and setting Britain on a course to disaster with no one left alive to rule or keep order by the end of the play.

Work Cited

Shakespeare, William. Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine, eds. The Tragedy of King Lear. Washington Square Press. New Folger's ed. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. Print.