While reading about children of emotional abusers, I encountered a piece which referenced King Lear’s most famous quotation: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth / It is to have a thankless child!” The author remarked that nobody seemed to know which daughter Lear meant — and that it was Cordelia. I was quite enchanted by this idea, but looked it up and learned that it was actually Goneril.
Disappointing? Not for long. I was inspired to re-read the play, and discovered something very interesting. If I read the play without the preconceived idea that Goneril and Regan are bad, they … aren’t. They tell their father what he wants to hear, but there’s no malice in it. Until Cordelia turns it serious, it’s just a little game of “Tell me how much you love me, girls.” He may have played similar flattery games before; Lear, Goneril, and Regan all seem to assume that this is a formality.
Goneril and Regan are usually blamed here for being phony. They are being phony, but I find it interesting that Lear requires such phoniness and even seems to believe it. Lear finds it plausible that he really is so utterly great that his daughters love him more than their husbands.
Cordelia, the acknowledged favorite, famously declines to lie. Her speech is colder than I remembered. As I recalled it, it was like “Look, I do love you, but when I marry I plan to love my husband as well. It wouldn’t be fair to him to love only you.” Instead, it really boils down to something more like “You did your duty as a father, including love. I now do my duty as a daughter, including love.” Depending on the actor’s delivery, there may be a sense that the love consists of actions without feeling, and that Cordelia’s honor and respect are driven entirely by duty and not by true attachment.
It’s an unusual case of the Golden Child being the truthteller. That becomes significant.
While Lear was directing this little playlet, two people repeatedly told Lear that he was making unwise choices. Both Kent and the Fool make repeated efforts to get through (and are ignored). Neither of them say that the older daughters are not to be trusted, though. They never state that it’s unwise to give up power to these two in particular — no, they think it’s unwise for Lear to give up external power over his children at all. They suggest that he is reversing the roles of child and parent by letting his children have power … and that this reversal is what’s unwise.
Who modeled parenting for Goneril and Regan? Who showed them how one behaves when one has the power? Why do Kent and the Fool, who know Lear well, both believe that it would be unwise for Lear to give up external power over the children he reared?
Goneril and Regan speak between themselves afterward. They have always known that Cordelia was Lear’s favorite. They express no overt resentment of that, but neither do they gloat that she is cast out. They are simply surprised that she would throw that away. They express no views on Lear’s plan to alternate between their homes instead of maintaining his own, so apparently they’re willing to give it a try.
Lear is a complete jackass of a houseguest. He disrupts Goneril’s court and demands she see him when she’s weary, at his pleasure alone. She even fakes illness to get some peace, but Lear demands she leave her “sickbed” to attend him. His knights pick fights with her knights, and he won’t discipline them. He gives Goneril orders in her own home. She doesn’t confront him until he insults, assaults, and humiliates Oswald, her steward and friend. She may be Lear’s daughter, but she’s also the Duchess of Albany, and she doesn’t have to take that.
Why does Lear hate Oswald so much? What was Oswald’s crime? The pivotal moment appears to be when Lear hits him (he hits lots of servants) and Oswald responds by saying, “I’ll not be strucken.” Kent intervenes to make sure Oswald is humiliated and Lear’s pride salvaged, but Oswald never actually submitted to Lear and never agreed to tolerate future blows. In Lear’s eyes, that makes him an unnatural fiend.
Lear is also the king, which could change things a bit. One is supposed to obey the king. However, the king wouldn’t normally tell a duke and duchess how to run their own court. It’s the father, not the king, who assumes himself the master of her house. Lear assumes that he should be in charge because he’s her parent, period, end of story. Her house is his house, automatically.
Goneril and her husband disagree.
Goneril never actually orders Lear out — he storms out because he’s not in charge. This is when he delivers the famous lines: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth / It is to have a thankless child!” Either he gets to beat up Goneril’s staff, or she’s ungrateful.
Goneril and Lear both write to Regan with their respective versions of events.
Lear approaches Regan, who tells him that, um, she kind of believes Goneril and he should go back and apologize. It never seems to occur to Regan that Goneril might be the fibber. She has known both people all her life, and she assumes Lear was really at fault.
Lear goes crazy with the drama, sarcastically kneeling and begging an imaginary Goneril to give him food, clothing, and shelter. He lacks none of those things — he has his own castle, and has luggage and knights in his royal caravan. He means his figurative “deprivation.” Apparently, refraining from hitting Oswald would be the equivalent of begging for crusts. Lear is an all-or-nothing guy; either things are ALL HIS WAY, or he’s being treated badly.
Regan ignores the theatrics and repeats that he sort of owes Goneril an apology. She’s not wrong.
Lear responds by raining curses down upon Goneril. The insightful Regan observes that he might be saying such foul things about her, Regan, during his next “rash mood” … and Lear rather sinisterly says that it won’t be a problem because Regan would never deny him anything.
Regan is impressively unimpressed by all Lear’s dramatic posturing. One gets the impression she has seen a lot of this before.
At this point, Team Goneril pops up. Although Goneril wasn’t pleased with Lear’s behavior, she was still concerned that he stormed off and has come to find him. Lear abuses Oswald some more, yells at Regan for greeting Goneril as a sister, and refuses to return with Goneril even though Regan already said she can’t put him up until she was expecting him. Lear says that he’d rather beg charity from that awful Cordelia or even that awful Oswald person, and that he will begin living outdoors! Now, again, Lear has his own castle, so this is just more crazy drama intended to make his daughters feel bad.
… and indeed, when Goneril says that’s his choice, he taunts her by saying that he’ll be living happily with Regan. He assumes he can steamroll Regan into this, even though she already said no, and so all that stuff about facing the wilderness was 100% drama. Regan declines again — she is not prepared to host him and his huge retinue of knights until the time she had planned, and he can’t come early unless he comes alone.
After more arguing, he swears unspecified but terrible revenge on the two “hags” and stomps off. As the sisters speak, a storm brews. Regan frets that Lear isn’t prepared, but Goneril’s done with Lear’s crap. Each says that Lear could live with her, but he and his knights can’t take over.
Meanwhile, Lear’s knights have all buggered off to some unknown location, probably their own homes. Kent sends for Cordelia, as the loyal Fool tries to persuade Lear to at least shelter with one of his daughters for one night. Lear screams curses at the sky instead. He reviles his daughters for shutting him out, but as the Fool witnessed, they did not. They simply didn’t want to host the knights (who are already gone) and put up with Lear’s abuse. Lear would rather face the storm than accept their household rules. This part is generally known as The Madness of King Lear, but Lear has been a drama llama ever since Cordelia declined to suck up. Is this legit trauma, or just more drama?
Lear meets a man whom he believes to be genuinely mad, and opines for several pages that “unkind daughters” must be to blame. The madness of a random stranger is really all about Lear.
At this point, things get complicated. There are multiple disguises, the B story begins intertwining with the A story, and Edmund’s lies mean that almost everyone is misinformed on at least a few matters. Lear, apparently mad, imagines himself in earlier times — and, tellingly, what he recalls is not love but power. He doesn’t imagine his daughters saying fond things; he imagines making one subject quake with a glance while showing mercy to another.
Baffingly at first glance, Goneril and Regan both start pursuing Edmund and thereby fracture their own sisterly relationship, as well as Goneril’s marriage (Regan has been widowed). Perhaps the idea is that such awful women must have no affection in their hearts for anyone … but Goneril went after Lear when he first stomped away, and Regan fretted over his fate in the storm. Both are still willing to take him in. Neither of them ever actually rejected Lear.
It’s interesting that both of them want Edmund specifically, because Edmund’s the only real manipulator we’ve seen so far. Who do predatory, manipulative men usually target? In our time, at least, they tend to go after women with unresolved father issues.
Let’s examine the play’s ending via a last look at the three daughters:
Goneril is traditionally interpreted as an evil, callous, scheming harridan who betrays and casts out her father, wrests military power from her husband, and brazenly begins an affair with the dreadful Edmund. As we’ve seen, there’s another side to her alleged betrayal of Lear, who repeatedly walked away from her offers to put him up on mutually respectful terms. Furthermore, she starts commanding the military because Albany won’t stop yakking about personal crap and “Honey, could we please focus on the invasion?” isn’t working too well. If we don’t begin with the assumption that Lear is axiomatically good, Goneril isn’t unsympathetic until she begins her affair with Edmund. Even that is more understandable when we recall that Albany has begun telling her she’s not worth the dust blowing into her face.
One could portray Goneril as evil and scheming, sure. One could also portray her as a woman who grew up under the sway of a hardcore narcissist, married for political reasons, eventually stood up to her father for her friend’s sake, endured her husband’s verbal abuse while trying to mobilize to defend the nation — and finally decided all those people could go hang, perhaps while breaking into a chorus of “It’s My Turn.”
At this point, Goneril believes that there are two people who care about her: Edmund and Regan. She then learns that Edmund has been two-timing her … with Regan. Regan responds to the same discovery by pathetically offering Edmund bribes, but Goneril walks off. We’re later informed that she has poisoned Regan and stabbed herself, fatally in both cases.
Goneril is done with all these jerks.
Regan, too, is usually viewed as a cold and immoral woman. Again, I see less evidence for that than most assume. She is similar to her older sister, but softer and more timid — she worries that Lear will turn on her as he has turned on Goneril, and she also worries about Lear being out in the storm, after he rejects her offer of shelter. She seems to have a decent marriage, with her husband indicating both affection and respect with lines like “My Regan has it right.” She is willing to kill to defend her husband, though he dies from his wounds anyway.
After his death, though, Regan has trouble coping with the press of events. She tries to help against the invasion, but even Oswald comments sardonically that “Your sister is a better general.” This may be why she is such easy prey for Edmund — like many women with father issues, Regan feels she NEEDS a man. When she learns that her new man is also courting her own sister, she offers him all her land and money if he will only keep his promise to marry her. When that doesn’t pan out, she suddenly feels very ill.
It’s not clear when Goneril poisoned Regan, but she hasn’t really had a chance so far. When Regan becomes too ill to function, she probably hasn’t had the poison yet. I’m reminded of another famous old English work, “Lord Randall,” in which the dying young lord repeats, “I am sick at my heart, and I fain would lie down.” Lord Randall died from a combination of poison and a broken heart, and I believe Regan does the same.
And then, of course, there is Cordelia. She’s traditionally regarded as the only good daughter, and she does indeed come through for Lear. The daughter who truthfully stated that she was motivated by duty, not fondness, came back to do her job as a daughter. Edmund gets her killed by tricking Goneril into signing a letter, and Lear very publicly dies of a broken heart as soon as a suitable audience is available.
One wonders what would have happened to this crew if Edmund’s schemes had failed earlier. Lear burned through Goneril’s patience in well under a month; how long would he have lasted with the not-into-pretense Cordelia, in a land he didn’t rule? Cordelia is supposed to be the loyal daughter, but their reunion was brief. How long would it have lasted?
Did Lear actually learn anything from all this? If he had lived and moved in with Cordelia, would he have been able to accept her and her husband’s mastery of their own house? Or would he have decided he was now basically the king of France, since his daughter owned France and he owned her? He might have found himself on a boat back to Britain in a week.
The tragedy of King Lear was not his death but his life. If he hadn’t been so certain that everyone must always adore and honor him because he was himself, he would have been fine.
In all likelihood, so would everyone else.