**This post is Part 6 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**

Changing up the format a bit this week to talk about the irredeemably tragic King Lear. Many tragedies are cold, callous, and indifferent. Lear, by contrast, is full of love and tenderness. In fact, it is precisely this love that motivates the central conflict in the story, as King Lear seeks to assure himself of his daughters’ love by his own authority and then goes mad in the face of their defiance.

But the love in King Lear is not just a plot device, and that is because the love in King Lear is not just anything–every relation of love in the play is a powerful, palpable attachment and affection. This is not a play about casual, conditional love, and it is the enormity of the love in the play that renders it so devastating.

In the play, Shakespeare puts this love under a microscope; or rather, he unleashes it and allows it to consume the play and its viewers, swelling itself to spectacular proportions. The effect is haunting, as we as audience come to terms with the fact that love, seen at this level of resolution, is essentially tragic.

Two of the less obvious elements of love’s tragic nature that Shakespeare gets right in Lear are worth noting here.

Love Confounds Us in our Freedom

At the heart of love is a paradox about freedom, and again I’m going to credit Slavoj Žižek for coining it well:

If there is a free choice it is that of a love object; love cannot be imposed. However, once fully in love we experience it as our fate – it holds us in its clutches, no matter how hard we try we cannot escape it. – Žižek,“Slaves to Freedom” in IAI News (3 Oct 2023)

For Žižek, love is a radically free act—an arbitrary decision to elevate one particular person above all others—but because that act retroactively reorganizes the way we see the world, it is then lived as if it had always been fated and could not have been otherwise. We “fall” in love; we do not experience true love as a choice based on the weighing of merits or interests.

Given that no love could seem more inevitable than that between parent and child, Shakespeare naturally chooses this type for his purposes in the play. In the character of King Lear, we find a will constrained by love, which is why he is free to disinherit his daughters and yet it does nothing to rid him of his anguish. He cannot free himself from his love.

We hear his proclamation “Here I disclaim all my paternal care” (Act I, Scene i, 115) as an absurd possibility, and at no point to we expect his heart to be sanguine in the wake of this outburst. We are, of course, correct; and while this opening scene is an ugly portrayal of the aging king, it is the last time we see him in any other temper than abject distress. He is not free to renounce his love for his daughter–the love has become inevitable.

Love is a Conflict of Freedoms

But of course, King Lear is not just wrestling with his own freedom. Act I finds him desperately warring with the freedom of his daughters. As the end of his reign draws near, he feels compelled to secure a promise of devotion from his daughters. In fact, he makes it quite clear he is unwilling to relinquish control unless it is exchanged for their promises of continued adulation:

Tell me, my daughters–

Since now we will divest us, both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state,–

Which of you shall we say doth love us most?

That we our largest bounty may extend

– Act I, Scene i, 48-53

In his insecurity, King Lear seeks a legalistic and contractual cure for his troubled mind. When he, in his freedom, encounters Cordelia in hers, the tragedy is already complete. All that remains is to play out the remaining moves on the board.

This tragedy is merely the amplification of the tension of wills in any loving relation. Sartre is tremendous (if a bit jargony) on this topic, so I will let him speak:

Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations. The following descriptions of concrete behavior must therefore be envisaged within the perspective of conflict. Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.

– Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pgs. 474-475

King Lear is just like any other father who loves his daughters and wants them to love him in return. His big mistake, however, is thinking he can triumph over the conflict of freedoms in love and arrive at some permanent, stable posture of control.

We are given to understand the relationship between Lear and Cordelia before the play was a largely pleasant one. But in asking for Cordelia’s total devotion, he goes too far. He asks for what she cannot give–her undivided love. He is seeking to enslave her, to assume her freedom as his own. Cordelia sees the absurdity of his desire:

Why have my sisters husbands, if they say

They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,

That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

Half my love with him, half my care and duty:

Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,

To love my father all.

– Act I, Scene i, 101-106

A married woman who claims to love her father only (and above all) is not a real wife; she is not a real free person. Cordelia rightly sees that her father’s demands not only cheapen her own freedom–they cheapen the very love that she shares with him. What is her love for her father worth, if not given freely?

He cannot have it both ways. If he is to be loved in a meaningful way by his daughter, she must be free to refuse him. Again, Sartre:

The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. […] He does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to persuade him that the beloved’s passion is a result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened.

– Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pg. 478

Rather than accept the inherent conflict of freedoms which constitutes love, King Lear spends the play battling against it. That it ends in ruin is no surprise, but it is shocking to have the high-minded ideas of Sartre taken all the way to their logical end and brought so gut-wrenchingly alive by the theater. This vividness is the great and devastating triumph of Shakespeare’s play as a work of art.

Conclusion

King Lear is, at its core, a love story, but it is not a happy one. Its unhappiness derives from the characters and their conflicts with one another, yet if this were all it were, the impression on the viewer would be slight.

But Lear is not merely unhappy, it is tragic. The horror of the story is its reality, the way it holds up the darker aspects of love, the way it prods on love’s more tender and unholy spots. It is the relevance of Lear in its relation to other love stories, including our own, that ruptures the edges of the story and contaminates our understanding of the world around us.

The effect is not an altogether pleasant one, and yet I feel content to say I am glad I read and watched the play.

Rating: 8.5/10