King Lear is a story, which deals with the idea of familial expectation and the roles in which parents and children play. Lear's madness and his obsession with being praised blinded him to the child who was really the only one who loved him, Cordelia. The same with the Earl of Gloucester, he was blinded by his illegitimate child, Edmund, who set out to turn him away from his heir, Edgar. Within the story, these two children and a few loyal servants try to help and eventually try to save the King and Gloucester,

This starts the downfall of King Lear because in a fit of peevishness he banished Cordelia. He saw her not being able to make a speech to him as her not being able to love him. He took the superficialness of her two sisters as a testament to him more than all her actions and the words she chose to speak to him. In a fit of anger, Lear cast Cordelia out. The King of France recognized the goodness in her and agreed to marry her without a dowry, but as far as King Lear was concerned she was dead.

Shakespeare takes the roles of parent-child relationships and has them turned asunder in King Lear. By having a father who will force his children to make declarations of love and his children playing along in the game, the one good sister is actually the one who gets hurt. The same happens in the sub-plot, Edgar really is the good son, however he is banished and wrongly accused because his father is willing to believe Edmund over him. The two true children are punished for their honesty. They refuse to give in and not follow their honor bound roles. With King Lear, Shakespeare takes what is expected and turns them around. A normal father would not be so quick to believe the embittered child or allow a favored daughter to be banished because she could not sing praises to him.

3) Heilman, Robert. Shakespeare: the Tragedies (New Perspective). Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1984.

1) Abrams, M. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. W. W. Norton and Co., New York, 1993.

King Lear's two daughters may have broken the bond between father and daughter, but Lear violated the trust of father to child. When he asked his daughter who loved him most, he broke the natural law of a parent treating all children equally. As a parent, he should have just given to his daughters equally, and not made them compete with one another. He broke the natural law as a father by judging his daughters on how they said the loved him.

This poses the first question in the play about what the bond between parent and child is. Lear is following a false sense of values for what his children should mean to him, He is taking the non-essential for the essential. Cordelia was the favored daughter; Lear should have based her inheritance on that, not on her inability to make a speech to him proclaiming her love. (Spencer, pg. 143)

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Approximate Word count = 1731
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)