Why did King Lear give up his kingdom in the first place?

I have a question regarding King Lear, as well.
To start with, I've recently read Jan Kott's famous essay on KL, the one in which he drew a comparison between Beckett and Shakespeare's theatre and I was just wondering if King Lear's central theme could really be summarized as the fall of the world. Of course one could expand on this theme and noticing, for example, how much the use of metaphor is functional to the development of the subject.
But wouldn't it be reductive? If the world's falling down and so its morality - and, of course, the use of symbol itself - how much "weight" would one give to the individual stories of Lear and that of Gloucester, mirroring the King's?

I don't think reading Beckett alongside Lear is appropriate. This is reading Beckett in the ancient tradition of 'Theatre of the Absurd'. Beckett depicts a world where the classical ideals of cause and effect don't work. Waiting does not bring Godot, Molloy's bicycle has no chain. This is Descartes' cogito turned on its head. Unamebale doesn't exist but he thinks and speaks. On the other hand, Shakespeare was steeped in the classical, Aristotelian tradition of cause and effect which had reached the Rennaisance Europe via Thomas Aquinas after being rediscovered and translated by the Arabs. Beckett talks about the influence of Arnold Geulincx on his writing which continued the tradition of 'occasionalism' of al Ghazali in the modern world (al Ghazali is the one who refuted the Aristotalians, specially Averroes in his book The Destruction of Philosophies). Mind and body don't work in harmony, causes are not precursors of effects. Everything is controlled by God. Beckett's world is a world without God where causes and effects have spun out of control of each other. If al Ghazali and Guelincx attributed the position of the ultimate cause of all effects to God, Beckett has no God where God aught (Godot???) to have been. God has left the universe and everything is gone pear shaped. Shakepeare's universe is all about causes and effects. People make mistakes and pay for their mistakes. It is how they face these consequences that makes them tragic heroes, the Greek ideal. Like flies to wanton boys etc. Lear is no fly. His greatness lies in his pursuit of self-knowledge:

Quote:

---

KING LEAR

Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:
Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied--Ha! waking? 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Fool

Lear's shadow.

KING LEAR

I would learn that;

---

This is not an absurd world. This is a world where people make mistakes and suffer for their errors. Beckett's world is totally different. 'This is how it is on this b1tch of an earth.' It is different from the classical ideals. It is the religious world without a God and since things don't depend on each other and effects don't depend on causes, why should there be a God to cause anything either? This is unAristotalian as well as unGhazalian thinking at a grand scale.

A whole lot of critics show the dangers of reading Shakespeare in the light of contemporary thinking. Shakespeare was for his own age. He had universal ideas but the plays themselves are Elizabethan and the world for those people was anything but absurd. There was meaning in their miserable lives and painful deaths. People were brought up to look for this meaning and live and die by it. Truth, order, justice, beauty, all these classical values were alive before they were smothered by the two world wars. If Shakespeare is absurd then Cordelia was stupid and Edgar was clever. Well, not for Shakespeare and his audience although people like Francis Bacon and Niccolo Machiavelli had already started changing people's perceptions.

For how much I know Shakespeare and Beckett so far, I say I have to agree.
Although Kott's reading is quite interesting and stimulating, it's to be said his reading of the King Lear is likely to be erroneous; I don't know if you have seen Peter Brook's film adaptation for King Lear, but it parallels Kott's reading of the Shakespearian drama and presents the same problems: to begin with, it presents a world where the traditional relation of cause and effects is unhinged. In Beckett there's no space for decisions or gestures and his vision of the story which endlessly repeats itself clearly oppose to shakespare's vision in which the beginning HAS to be different from the development, regardless whether a catharsis is still possible or not.
In Shakespeare’s drama the King both esperiences the collapse of his moral world and the weight of his own mistakes. He is both the foolish who is guilty of his errors and the victim of a world collapsing. I think it’s very correct to affirm Lear’s word is a world where Gods are absent and yet there’s still a cosmic vision, there’s still a moral/social/familiar order to be broken, whereas Godot’s world is a world in which there’s no space for meaning or something that could give meaning/order to the chaos, so that symbols mean nothing and individual drama has already reached the zero point.
The epicness of Lear’s drama is that both him and Gloucester go through the experience of seeing how blind they have been.
So, to put it straight, Lear’s world is tragic and it progressively advances towards “decay”, but it’s still “ordered”. Things don’t go as they should because the King rejects his own daughter and his other two daughters rebels to his authority, whereas Beckett’s world has no “cause”, there’s not an event leading anywhere.
Another curious thing I’m still unsure about is the use of “symbols” by Shakespeare. The storm, for example, can be interpretated according to a cosmic order, but it’s Lear’s vision – corrisponding to the view of Elizabethean people, I guess. Edmund, which could be said to be a “free creator”, as Iago was, is unable to recognise the cosmic order Lear and Gloucester feel corrupted.
That may lead to a distinction between two kinds of “nature”... I guess Northrop Frye has developed this argument very well, but I still can’t understand the exact use of metaphors in Shakespeare.
What’s your take?

Ah yes, storms in Shakespeare. They essentially just signal that something bad is on its way.

So far I haven't encountered many storms as I've just read six of his plays: Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello and The Merchant of Venice.
Anyway, the ambivalent symbolic value of the storm in King Lear essentially derives from the fact one could either see the storm as it could be indicative of Lear's tumultuous mental state or as an hint to the order of the nature being corrupted, for example.
Moreover, as Northroph Frye has noticed, the world "nature" had different meanings during the Elizabethean age, both indicating an upper grade of civilization and a lower one, as we see in Edumun's first monologue, I think.
What I'm yet to understand is the exact "role" of metaphor in Shakespeare's works, especially in the King Lear, wherein it's all but difficult grasping Gloucester's actual blindness, Lear's madness and the storm are intended to be metaphors - and that could be seen as a neat difference between Shakespeare and Beckett's poetics. (It's clear enough Beckett doesn't use symbols, at least not in a traditional way)
Also, it's been noticed Gloucester's sub-plot mirrors the main one, but are we supposed to take it as a "real referent" to Lear's plot or not?

The best wy to read Shakespeare is to read the imagery. Shakespeare speaks in imagery. What the poet means is what the characters paint through words. I have mentioned the imagery of bestiary in dragon and his wrath. Animal imagery is very important to Shakespeare and almost always depicts animal passions and baseness in his characters. Sexual connotations between 'nothing' that lies between a woman's legs is repeated in Hamlet quite a few times and re-appears in Lear's reproach to his daughter.

Kott and Brooks worked in parallel. Kott tried to drag Shakespeare to mid 20th Century by his heels. There is a narrow line between being universal and being anachronistic. The absurdist view is anachronistic to Shakespeare. I believe that even Beckett is not absurd. He just tried to see the world differently from the classical view that he received from James Joyce who received it from the Jesuits who received it from St Thomas Aquinas who received it from Averroes (Ibn i Rushd) and Avicenna (ibn i Sina) who received it from Aristotle. Curiously enough, Aquinas did not respect al Ghazali's thoroughly theological ideas and religious refutation of Aristotelian cause and effect and went the other way to Christianize Aristotle the way Averroes had Islamized him a century before Aquinas.

Yeah, I'm having troubles getting accustomed to Shakespeare's poetic, but I'll work on it!
Of course Shakespeare's universalism doesn't imply he can be forced into a contemporary interpretation/view and one has to take into account the fact he was still a man of his age. Plays like Hamlet, King Lear or Othello have universal resonance in their themes and it's okay one could see - for example - in Hamlet a precursor of Nietzschean or Freudian theories, but what's to be highlighted is that Shakespeare cannot be restrained in a method; first of all because he wasn't a philosopher or a theorist - although I have to admit I'm a bit obsessed by meaning - but a poet who speaks in imagery, and secondly because in a way he already contained all of these theories, but it's "absurd" limitating his genius to that.
He presented situations and characters and it would be reductive saying he was trying to say anything or to express an unique point of view. My problem with Shakespeare so far is that I have still not found a method to read/interpretate Shakespeare in a proper way. Of course it's arguable if there's a single method: it's to be said countless readings of Shakespeare's canon over the centuries have been given, so that we have a storicist Shakespeare, a Romantic one and so on... now for a beginner that's rather confusing, especially when one has to analyze complex works such as Hamlet!

Back IT, in King Lear animal imagery probably gives the idea of human's passions such as lust, hate - I believe the dragon was mentioned by Lear in his speech to Kent - and should maybe be seen according to the view of a "lower" nature opposing to the "higher" one, the status to which the human's moral behaviour should tend to elevate oneself.

You are on the right track. The idea of nature is the predominant theme in late Medieval and Renaissance literature. Medievalists were obsessed with the imagery of animals in all forms of arts. Their devils have horns, hoofs, tails and goat's heads etc. I think this was Christianity's total and seemingly complete departure from the ancient religions where animals were worshiped (the ram-headed Amon Ra, the cat gods, the alligator gods of Egyptians, Zeus took the form of a swan to impregnate Leda, the goat god Pan etc). Christianity created the division between animal nature (base nature) and human or higher nature (reason). Before the so-called revealed religions the harmony of humans, animals and gods was carefully maintained through pagan religions. We see Chaucer using animal imagery to depict the bad characters. Shakespeare wrote in the same tradition.

As far as larger metaphors of the play are concerned, there are two plots, two tragic flaws and two different punishments for these flaws. Lear gave up reason when he believed Goneril and Regan's empty words. He went mad for his sin of reason. Gloucester took pleasure in the act he performed with Edmund's mother, his punishment was blindness. Both had to go through punishment to learn the truth, King underwent mental punishment because his was the sin of the mind, Gloucester had to go through bodily punishment as his was the sin of body ('out vile jellies). Gloucester explicitly starts with the absurdist premises ('like flies to wanton boys/ they kill us for their sport") and gradually learns the truth ("I stumbled when I saw").

Sorry I studied the plays 23 years ago and knew the whole texts by heart at the time. I have forgotten most of it. Watched some of Peter Brooks's Lear the other day and hated it. My favorite is Alec Guiness in BBC's audio version. That Lear roars and raves like a true mad king. Once again, try to read the play through imagery. That is the best way to read Shakespeare in my humble opinion.

I think Helen Gardner wrote against contemporary interpretations of Lear that take it out of its Elizabethan context.

Yeah, I think I'll watch Guiness' adaptation; the only Lear adaptations I've seen are the versions by Peter Brook and "Ran" by Akira Kurosawa, which I ranks as one of cinema's greatest achievments, but it's only loosely based on the play - anyway it conveys King Lear's main ideas very well or without being anachronistic!
I'll have to look for some Gardner's essays as I'm really interested in that; of course the question here is how much can universality be contextualized and viceversa, but it's a given for centuries Shakespeare's plays have been subjected to the themes of the period.
I've even watched an adaptation of the Hamlet by Carmelo Bene which pretty much dismisses the traditional plot and focuses on the "unspoken" of the text. Carmelo Bene's theatre proceded along the lines of some philosophers of the period, such as Gilles Deleuze... the operation is indeed interesting but it takes Shakespeare totally out of his actual context!
As for the matter on "nature" I think it's central to the plot of the KL, as well, exactly because some actions were seen as morally degrading, hence making the animal imagery inspired.
Also, I have to say I have read KL twice so far but I've never perceived how much the punishment both Lear and Gloucester are appropriate to their own guilt, making Lear's punishment a mental one and viceversa. This surely denotes the aristotelian nature of cause and effects still portrayed by Shakespeare: one has to pay for having infringed the universal order and so everything that happens is a divine punishment, and the result of having been subjugated by inhuman, innatural passions. (I remember Lear insisting a lot on the point Gonerilla and Regan are inhuman monsters for transgreding the rule).
Of course during the years a lot of readings have been given, trying to humanize those characters, but it's still apparent Shakespeare wrote his plays for people of his age having their own recognisable morality so although Shakespeare absolutely didn't disregard characters' complexity, in KL he still focused on morality, although he generally doesn't "judge" his characters in a direct way. Out of all the six plays I've read so far King Lear is the one in which he focuses on morality rules and on responsability the most, maybe along with Hamlet, so the common idea Shakespeare "shows" characters more than judging them is somehow biased and ignores the fact Shakespeare was still estabilished in that tradition.
Now, if I have to be honest I have to admit I have my own problems in accepting this kind of "dualistic" concept, the fact the world could clearly be split in "high" and "low", maybe I'm too much focused on a contemporary vision and my sensibility is clearly closer to that of the likes of Kafka or Beckett, but of course it's the way a writer portays his own vision of the world to make the difference.
Comparating geniuses as Dante or Shakespeare to modern sensibility may be an understandable operation as we feel their sensibility as somehow difficult to be accepted, but in the end it would result an useless strecthing, as one hasn't to acknowledge the "modernity" of a work to see it works. Does the Sistine Chapel represent contemporary man's opinion about the man? Of course not!
Or has one to share Beethoven's Illuministic Ideals to love his Ninth Symphony? Of course not! Art differs from simple ideas and it's all about the exposition of those ideas; that's what makes the difference, although one can still personally prefer what he feels closer to his sensibility.
On a side note, I've just seen this link gives pretty good insights on the matter, I'll check it out later! http://www.shakespeare-online.com/es...ndnature2.html
Also, today I've read again Northroph Frye's essay on King Lear and I must admit there's one question really interesting me: to which degree are we supposed to "read" Shakespeare's elizabethean view of the world in opposition to his universalism?
The question lies at the heart of much of Shakespearian critic, also today: is it possible to trace a Shakesperian view, as much as we have a Beckettian view of the world, or Dante had his own?
A possible answer is that Shakespeare didn't have to express his OWN point of view but had to make his tragedies relevantly recongisable by people of the period and to do that he also had to order things according to the view people had during that time... the great chain of beings, eg.

Unfortunately it is very difficult to find now but if you could lay your hands on Eleanor Prossers's Hamlet and Revenge, you will be able to see how deeply Shakespeare was steeped in the ideas and beliefs of his own times and how hard he tried to depict what was believed by all sections of his own audience. He was a thoroughly commercial writer, the most successful playwright of his time, a kind of Elizabethan Stephen Spielberg BUT he was an extremely clever writer. There is no groundbreaking thinking in his plays, no new ideas. His art lies in the succinct depiction of what was known but not so well expressed, the express aim of literature according to Alexander Pope. Robert Frost put this in different words, "the joy of knowing what you never knew that you knew." For classicists, Aristotle had done all the thinking. King Lear is often criticised for not fulfilling the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. Of the four major tragedies, this is the most ambitious, the most grand of the tragedies but it is also often singled out as the most flawed one. Shakespeare's greatness lies in his depiction of situations not creation of ideas. His ideas are quite common-place classical wisdom of common sense. There are echoes of such erudite thinkers as St Augustine or Parmenides in a number of lines ("Nothing will come of nothing" "The king is a thing of nothing") but there is nothing groundbreaking here. What we find of importance is the expression of known truths. Even in Dante, a lot is already known. He took his aesthetics from Aquinas and most of the subject matter of the Comedia,according to Acin Placios, is borrowed from the mysticism of ibn i Arabi as depicted in The Alchemy of Happiness. Very recent work by Daniela Boccassini also points in that direction (Il volo della mente. Falconeria e sofia nel mondo mediterraneo. Islam, Federico II, Dante. 2003). Great writers don't say new things, they say what is already known in new ways. Classicists always look to the past for their inspirations (TS Eliot "Tradition and Individual Talent") and add a bit of their own genius which takes tradition to the future. Philosophers are the ones who break new grounds in thinking. What Aristotle said is very different from what Derrida said but what Derrida said had some complicated links with what Plato had said before him, the chain of tradition is one long series of creative events. You can't come out of it completely and stay relevant.

You mentioned 'the Great Chain of Being' which is highly relevant to King Lear. Living in 21st century, it might seem irrelevant to us but the Western tradition is strongly built on this idea and the idea of human 'nature' is an offshoot of the Great Chain of Being. King Lear is about human nature. In reality man is nothing more than 'a bare, forked animal', what makes this animal different is its actions and thoughts. 'Unaccommodated man', man away from human civilisation, from the tradition that made man human, is nothing but an animal. Shakespeare is spreading all these pearl of wisdom through Lear's tongue but does the old man know what he is saying? Does he know that he is facing the ultimate truths about humanity, the good as well as the evil in human nature? I think this is the education of Lear. Shakespeare is more subtle than the Greek playwrights. He loves ambiguity. Hamlet is ambiguous right from the start. Lear starts in misdirected conviction and blinding self-assurance and moves through suffering to the realisation of ambiguity. Does Lear learn anything? Shakespeare shows him both sides of the coin in Goneril, Regan (evil), Edgar, Cordelia, Kent (good). He does recognise Cordelia's goodness. Is that enough? He has to die but he has to die after learning the truth. Does he achieve this milestone? I think he recognises Cordelia, recognises goodness after going through the evil stormy night and also recognises that Cordelia is dead. Everything is transient. All evil characters die. Edgar and Kent survive. In the struggle between good and evil, a lot is destroyed from both side. The ray of light survives in the form of surviving good characters. Main players had to die because they had all unleashed forces which could only be satisfied by their destruction. The future belongs to goodness. St Augustine preached that since all things come from God and God is good, all things are good. Even Satan needs some goodness in order to exist because malum nihil est (evil is nothing). Evil is not the absence of good but a perversion of good. In a new world that is left after Lear's death, all evil is destroyed and only a handful of good characters survive in order to bring about a new beginning till somebody tries to ignore goodness, gives up on human nature and become evil, disturb the balance of the natural order and the whole circle starts all over again.

Thanks for the link to this essay. It looks really good. Sorry I've been away from Shakespeare for over two decades now. Much of what I learned from an excellent teacher is forgotten.

Sorry for being late!

Believe it or not it's been a week now since I started looking for the essay by Prosser but couldn't find it, it's a shame! I just got to read some excerpts from it, and all I could understand is that she believed the drama's central theme to lie in the quarrel between private revenge and providential revenge, maintaining the ghost who appeared to the prince to indeed be a "goblin damned" rather than a heaven-sent one.
Of course it's a fascinating theory and the readers' general approval gives the essay a strong relevance in Shakespeare's critic. I have also read Eleanor Prosser had to retort all the assertions the book received, as it surely had to be a groundbreaking one, as we have seen critics raising more and more problems as years went by, all according to the context each critic belonged to.
I have recently read some books by Bloom - the world's most famous confessed bardolater - and he aimed to a completely different kind of analysis, sticking on the humanity of Hamlet rather than to the morality of the play: for how great he is and one could admire him and although being sometimes very high-pitched, it's to be said other times he tends to exaggerated a bit and, above all, seems to forget the context Shakespeare was writing in.
I still don’t have a firm opinion on Hamlet because I don’t have great knowledge of the period to estabilish wheter is reasonable to stick more on Shakespeare’s universalism or to his connection with elizabethean morals.
Of course the greater part of Shakespeare’s admirers tend not to see any “values” coming from his works underlining Shakespeare’s ability to be that of presenting innumerable point of views and expressing the whole spectrum of human emotion so my very first “critical” approach to him was that, but then again, one cannot ignore the presence of a specific context withing his plays: for how much Bloom and others underline Shakespeare’s faith to be unknown and Hamlet’s perspective to be skeptical during the first four acts – one cannot ignore that seemingly spiritual acceptance of his fate in his last conversation with Horatio before the fight – there’s a precise christian context in the work, indipendently whether Shakespeare wanted to give people the impression it was his own faith or not. What’s concerning is that Shakespeare wanted to create context very much recognisable for his audience and not offending their own morality.
Given that, one could also understand why Cordelia’s death in the King Lears was neglected for a very long time: it was difficult to be accepted.
And yet the very notion of “moral context” seems not to be doubtful, even in his darkest dramas, as King Lear or Macbeth, which is described by Bloom as presenting a pre-christian world, never lacking supernatural events/figures.
I would really like knowing more about the period – I should be able to read some of Christopher Marlowe’s plays soon – and I’ll try to inform more about Prosser’s essay, it really interests me a lot!

Also, I have to completely agree on the impossibility of having a completely groundbreaking thinking: even the same Derrida – which I know by name and have just read something about Artaud’s theatre – had to work on tradition to criticize it, and it’s really impossible for an artist or even a philosopher to be totally out of the context; each one is subdued to his own context and not even context itself can be singularly individuated and studied in itself.

I think a whole library of essays could be written about the value of “catharsis” in shakespearian tragedy! Some, even Northrop Frye himself, seem not to consider the ending of tragedies as Macbeth, King Lear or Hamlet as cathartic, but one could still argue the value of catharsis in itself is more complex and ambiguous than the one displayed in the Greek tragedy, as it has to pass through a greater complexity, and yet one cannot dispute about the fact Shakespeare always tend to come full circle and longing for a purification of the world which still has to pass through the annihilation of the guilty party... still there are some casualties in it – Ophelia in Hamlet or Cordelia in King Lear – because, like I’ve said, it’s maybe possible this kind of purification is a more complex one than that of the classic tragedy. In order for a new order to be constructed it’s maybe not enough to have just the guilty ones scourned and killed(take Lear, for example, for he has to pass trough realization of his folly before having to die of sorrow), but innocents casualties are contemplated: for we live in a world were love, as violence still happens, acting morally could prevent from having more casualties, but one cannot be completely assured from evil.
Lear’s folly is not just that of presumptuosly giving his reign off, but also that of believing love to be measurable, like N. Frye still has noticed.
And yet love’s a natural feeling – Lear insists a lot Gonerilla and Regan to be unnatural beings and we have no reasons to think people in the Elizabethean Age saw it differently, although Edmund has a different conception of nature – which has otherwise no further explainations and Lear’s principle “nothing comes out of nothing” also reflects his idea that love should be a prize for his cares and a right of his own, exactly like his royalty which is disproven as a result of him having given it away at the beginning, like if he was able to decide for it, acting presumptuosly, again.

On a side note, the conception of a circular history which repeats itself endlessly, starting good, slowly deteriorating until evil factors have to be destroyed and a new world has to be created, and so on, is a very interesting theme, it echoes Vico's conception of history, which I had to encounter again last week as I've read part of Beckett's essay on Joyce!

Very interesting reading all these views! I'm writing a novel based on KL and the original inspiration was imagining that Lear had a good reason behind his decision to abdicate.