As the audience prepares for King Lear's death, while biting its nails for the impending sword duel between the two estranged brothers, note that throughout this drama real a stupid cat a fight developed between Regan and Goneril. We can go back to the beginning. After Goneril states that he loves his father "more than words can handle the matter," (33) a wording that could never be topped, Regan declares that his sister "is too short." (34) They get together when it's convenient for them and the plot. They are equally willing to throw their father to the wind when he demands his humanity. And when each sees an opportunity to satisfy her feminine urge, each is willing to do anything - poison or stab the other - to win the prize. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In fact, Regan and Goneril aren't characters at all. Shakespeare draws them as easily as he does the obsequious servant Oswald, imbuing them with all the motives, nuances, passions that would suit a tiger or a two-year-old. Nor are they really different from each other. By the end of the play, only Shakespeare scholars could tell you who claimed Edmund first, who stabbed who, or who dies and when. The reason is, of course, that it makes no difference to the game. They are interchangeable. They are bad sisters, bad wives, bad daughters. And that's all. Compare them to the play's other evil force, Edmund. Regan and Goneril essentially perform the same function as him: to deceive their father for their own benefit, at the cost of his sanity and his life. Edmund, however, offers us all the complexity of a developed character. When we meet him, he reveals what worries him. He asks the sky: "Why vile?" (44) He later shows the workings of a philosophical mind when he tells us that he does not believe in any "heavenly compulsion" (47) and therefore "that should have been what [he is]." We know exactly why he is mad at his brother, exactly the nature of his drive for power, exactly why he has so much confidence in himself. We like it even against our will. It's what Regan and Goneril would be if Shakespeare wanted them to come to life. The third sister is no more real than her eldest. She is good, pure and simple. Again, we see this in the first scene of the play, as its opening lines are: "What will Cordelia say? Love and be silent." (33) This fairy-tale princess is clearly contrasted with her evil "oily-tongued" sisters. Then, when the villains toss the father back and forth, pushing the story forward, Cordelia is in France, as absent as the ideals are in that dark center of the play. When she returns, she is heroine, friend and martyr all in one. When Lear calls her "a happy soul" (146) it is both a truism and a premonition. He is an angel on stage and a fallen angel in death. In short, she is completely unambiguous, completely single-minded, and, as characters go, uninteresting. Edgar, his counterpart in goodness, has so much personality that he is forced to split in two. She's not supernatural, like Cordelia is. Although he too has been banished by his father, he does not disappear into a distant land. Instead we follow him in his struggle, in his role as a beggar. We feel his agony as he realizes that his father is blind. Let him guide us as he leads his father to the edge of reality in the world of metatheatre. We wonder why he keeps his identity a secret. We see him lose himself in his invented character. We learn from what he learns, admiration for what he admires. He is a real human being, perhaps even more soaudience member than a character in a play. It's unpredictable. She is the opposite of Cordelia in every way, except that they are both on the same team. The good son and the bad son are flesh and blood. The good daughter and the bad daughters are quick strokes of the pen. What this does is dichotomize plot from subplot, making Lear's tragedy more mythical and larger in scale than Gloucester's. But more importantly, it creates a gender barrier: the men in the play think, fight, and suffer, while the women fight and die. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it is an oversimplification that Shakespeare invites the audience to make. We are never asked to examine women's motivations or ideas; they simply are. They direct the plot forward like directions. It's the men we're interested in. All of this begs the question: What about Lear's wife? And Gloucester's wife and lover? They are both remarkably dead and buried. Surely, if they had been in the play, they would have moderated their partner's madness, limiting, in a sense, their ability to represent their characters. But we don't even have mention of their names. Lear refers directly to his wife only once, when he tells Regan that he "would have divorced me from your mother's grave, burying an adulteress" (84) if she had not been happy to see him arrive at her door. What Lear implies here is that none of his daughters would turn him away. And implicit in this idea is that his wife, or lover, is responsible for Regan's actions. We see here that Lear, at least at the beginning of the play, believes that fate is determined in part by the relationship between mother and father. Gloucester, for his part, initially refers briefly to the mothers of his children, comparing his two sons. In the course of the play, of course, the "vile" turns out to be "vile", the "legitimate" turns out to be good. It makes sense to think that Gloucester comes to believe what Lear implies earlier when he realizes that "Edgar has been abused." (116) He even pleads, “Gentle gods, forgive me,” the word “gentle” implies that the gods rule rationally, which in turn implies that “vile” is vile. If women are non-existent or plot-centric or both, then it is only a small leap to say that all determinants - and by this we mean the inevitable movements of drama and, therefore, of life - are female in nature. Lear has no more power to change who Regan and Goneril are than he can persuade Cordelia to abandon her virtues and tell lies. These elements are the "givens" of the play, as are Edgar and Edmund's positions towards each other, determined long ago by the status of their mothers. To risk further abstraction, Fortune herself is a woman, and yet another cause of unavoidable suffering. Even nature is defined as a “goddess”. Furthermore, the number of sisters present in the work is not at all arbitrary: in this pagan world it is impossible to avoid comparing them to the three Fates, who hold the threads of life of all the other characters in their hands. Isn't leaving Lear to the wind simply a way of cutting his strings? If "man's life is as good as that of a beast" (90) when he no longer has what "nature needs," have not Regan and Goneril deprived Lear of his life as a man when they leave him alone with the clothes he wears? Beyond this idea of ​​Woman as Cause, however, looms one of Shakespeare's favorite topics, sex. These two ideas are brought together brilliantly by Edmund in the monologue in which he rails against conventions. It makes fun of those who believe that we are what we are thanks to a "divine push". (48), the phrase “to push” recalls that act ofhuman drama in which we "push". He then goes on to say that it makes no difference when his father "butts out" with his mother. Thus we see that acting against what appears to be divine law means acting against sex determination. The Fool jokes to the same effect. One of his riddles ends with the parable: "Leave your drink and your whore,/ And stand in a door,/ And you will have more/ Than two tens for a score." (55) Since a score is by definition two sets of ten, it follows that it is impossible to abandon alcohol and whoring. We have no choice, according to the fool, but to mate. In another parable, the Fool teaches that when "prostitutes and whores build churches.../ the going will be used with the feet." (97) Since “going” is always done with the feet, this means that prostitutes build churches. Whores, a symbol of sex, are metaphorically responsible for constructing the edifices in which we admit our vileness to a greater power, in which we surrender our will to Another. Additionally, the Fool had previously referred to Fortune as a "conscripted whore." (81) We can see, according to the Fool, how sex governs the cosmos. Similarly, Goneril attributes the bad behavior of Lear's knights to "epicurism and lust", which make his palace "like a brothel". (59) He uses this as an excuse to cut off Lear's "train", which causes Lear to seek refuge in his other daughter's house. Lust could therefore be said to be the primary cause of Lear's madness, for apparently it is lust that must separate Lear from his beloved knights, and lust that separates Lear from his eldest daughter. When Edgar invents a madness, he also attributes it to lust. It says that he "served the lust of [his] mistress's heart, and performed with her the deed of darkness." (102) He advises Lear not to allow “the creak of shoes nor the rustle of silk” to take over his “heart” as it has its own made-up character. The fact that Edgar imagines lust as one of the causes, if not the main one, of his madness is particularly interesting and relevant because throughout the book there is a precise parallel between Edgar and Shakespeare. Edgar, for example, expounds the scene on the cliffs of Dover before his father in much the same way that Shakespeare expounds the dialogue of that scene. Edgar also creates a totally fictional character in Tom, just as Shakespeare created an entire cast of characters. And just as Shakespeare made lust the main driver behind the scenes, so too did Edgar. So far, "woman" has led to "sex" and "sex" to "lust", without any unifying idea. That idea must be fertility. Without fruitfulness there can be no life. Without life there can be no King Lear. Fertility is the great precondition. If we have the ability to prevail over natural forces, then we can avoid the "brothel", as Edgar advises. If we cannot, as the ending of the work seems to suggest (taking its popular, modern and negative reading), then that precondition is as good as destiny. It is this wheel that turns; "race" evil. (45). It is the cycle of the years. A classic symbol of fertility is the egg, where the force of life is stored. In Lear the egg is mentioned twice. The Fool mocks Lear for dividing his kingdom between his two daughters. He says he can make two crowns from one egg by cutting "the egg in the center and eating the flesh." (56) This implies that Lear's flesh was his kingdom, that his life, in fact, was his kingdom. Unfortunately, this must mean that he unintentionally sacrificed his own life, a fact that is revealed to be true in the final act. This whole analogy works under the larger metaphor of fertility, which.