In King Lear, Shakespeare shows how Lear's blindness to the emotions of the people that truly love him, leads him to put himself in peril. At the beginning of the play Lear called his three daughters together and told them that he proposed to divide his kingdom evenly among them, the only stipulation that Lear made was that before he did he wanted to hear how much each of his daughters loved him. The first daughter to confess her love for her father was Goneril and she set forth before Lear that she loved him more than words could say, she loved him dearer than eyesight, space or liberty, more than life, grace, health, beauty, and honor.

Throughout King Lear and in the play within the play we can see that opposing forces that are put into work by one group or character can affect the actions of other characters and that these forces in some way send the plotline and storyline into a new direction or set of possibilities that had not be foreshadowed to the reader at an earlier point. There is no exception in King Lear as Shakespeare interweaves many opposing forces such as sight vs. blindness, that adds greatly to the plotline of both works within King Lear, also included is faithfulness vs. cruelty which is felt by almost all of the characters within King Lear at some point. Throughout the play it is felt by many of the characters that there vulnerability at one point or another in some way leads to cruelty towards them by another character at a later point in the play. The basis of King Lear is that throughout the play there are forces acting on all the characters in the play to evolve the plotline to the end result of setting the characters up for the ending that makes the play a classic tragedy through the lose of the tragic hero.

In King Lear there is intertwined a similar plotline that includes one of his Noblemen Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund and Shakespeare interweaves them throughout the play showing how these opposing forces that are in effect on King Lear can also be seen by others and how the treachery and deceit of family is often more painful then any wound suffered through mortal hands. In this side of King Lear we see that the opposing forces of Faithfulness versus reality can also be seen in the second scene of the first act, when we see Edmund, the bastard son, plotting to dupe the honest brother Edgar out of his paternal inheritance in a soliloquy, "Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land." (Act 1.2, 16) It is a bit discouraging to see devilish individuals like Edmund, Goneril, and Regan prosper in these first two scenes, but this is all with a specific purpose. In act four, scene one the insidious plot of Gloucester's bastard son is furthered. After Edmund learns of the possibility of an outbreak of civil conflict between the two Dukes, he calls his legitimate brother in and convinces him that he should flee because their father has learned of his presence, and the Duke of Cornwall suspects him of treasonous dealings with Albany. This scene brings together many of the villains of this piece, with Cornwall, Regan, and Edmund all ending the scene as allies.

The opening of the play is a foreshadowing another set of opposing forces that is intertwined with Lear's blindness and this can be seen through out the play as Lear slowly begins to realize that he has made a mistake. The opposing forces are that of faithfulness versus treachery and these can be seen by both King Lear as he realizes that the daughters that earlier confessed their un

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Approximate Word count = 1928
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)