The Primitive Coloring of King Lear


by Bhaskar Banerjee - Date: 2007-04-26 - Word Count: 425 Share This!

Shakespeare's King Lear is founded on a childish incident where an old king decides to give away his kingdom to the child who professes to love him most. And this primitive groundwork is matched by the primitiveness of its people and the world in which they live. Here is a picture of a remote and pagan Britain before the advent of Christianity. The theater is unchristened Nature, and here a royal household with the freedom to be publicly and brutally selfish which primitive royalty confers, works out its inhuman intrigues and deeds.

It is a world ruled directly by the elements and heavenly bodies, by omens, and by known and unspecified deities. Thus Lear takes his oath

by the sacred radiance of the sun

The mysteries of Hecate and the night,

By all the operations of the orbs

This primitive faith is fatalist. Demons lie in wait for these pagans; plagues in the sky hang "fated over man's faults". Gloucester coaxes and wheedles his divinities. Only Lear stands up at them, and his voice is directed to the Elements and to Nature herself, the Universal Goddess.

Hear, Nature! Hear, dear Goddess hear!

The theme of the heartlessness of Youth to Age dominates the play. Shakespeare makes it the most bitter and fatal quality of his primitive world. The cruelty suffered by Lear and Gloucester bespeak of a possible universal cruelty, of a law of Nature. The play is riddled with the contempt of Youth for Age: 'idle old man', 'old fools are babes again'. The inhuman conduct of Goneril and Regan spring from a barbarous and primitive inability to look at age without contempt. Lear also clearly sees that 'age is unnecessary'. Here is the law of the primitive community, of the jungle.

The domination of Nature with the helplessness of humanity which accompanies it, is linked with a pervading curiosity to know the secrets of Nature. Gloucester cites 'the wisdom of Nature', the natural philosophy of his time. It is that concern about the causes of things from the passionate probings of Lear into the hidden virtues of things to the insistent play by the Fool with the popular curiosities. Thus the Fool asks why the snail has shell for his house and the nose is in the middle of the face.

But Lear's world is not one of primitive brutalities and primitive beliefs alone, because alongside these there also abides and operate many Christian beliefs like patience, devotion, love, truthfulness and honesty. This primitive world is thus not lopsided; it is multi-dimensional in its balanced mixture of absolute evil and absolute goodness.


Related Tags: pagan, bodies, heavenly, omen

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