King Lear is a tragedy by Shakespeare which tells the story of an incompetent king who
slowly descents into madness as his relationship with his three daughters Goneril, Regan,
and Cordelia worsens through his own actions. Through his dysfunctional parenting and his
preferential treatment towards Cordelia, his two older daughters end up making it their life’s
goal to ruin him and take his power and pushes the play to its depressing end.
However, while this is a key factor towards Lear’s demise, it is mostly talked about as a
passing thought, and the general consensus is always to focus on Goneril and Regan’s
merciless rampage for power rather than what led up to it. I chose to comment on Lear’s
parenting for the sake of delving deeper into Lear’s faults and how much harm it brought on.
This will be discussed in terms of his tendency to put the sisters against each other, his
favouritism towards Cordelia, his blatant disrespect for Goneril, and his parentification of
Regan.
To be able to carry out this discussion, a definition for dysfunctional parenting will be needed.
Dysfunctional parenting, in this essay, will be defined as a style of parenting that is the cause
for a rift or an unnatural change in the relationship between a parent and a child, as well as
among siblings.
Lear blatantly encourages toxic rivalry and competition among his children. The play opens
with a ceremony hosted by Lear, where he calls upon the three sisters to make a speech,
asking “Which of you shall we say doth love us most”, and through this alone will decide who
will gain the most dowry. Lear, as a king and as a father, had all the power to divide the
kingdom equally and give it to his daughters as is, or judge through all his years of raising
them when it comes to who loves him the most. However, his decision to define a deep,
complex emotion with a few flowery words reflects his superficial view on familial love, as
well as the role he played in tearing apart the sisters.
This twisted view of love seeps into how he judges the sisters as well. Goneril and Regan
make use of flowery, hyperbolic language to describe their love for Lear, such as Goneril’s
“Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty” or Regan’s “I profess myself an enemy to all other
joys”, professions of love that are clearly exaggerated just for the sake of gaining the dowry,
as seen in the later parts of the play where they have no hesitations and leaving Lear to
suffer in the storm. Right after Goneril finishes her speech, he points at the map and draws
the territory in which Goneril will be in control over. He does not thank her for her love and
praise, nor does he say anything to her outside of matters regarding the materialistic gifts he
is willing to give her, further proving that his love is not rooted in its intrinsic value, but rather
on physical objects and words, whether they be empty or not.
There are also signs of Regan trying to compete against Goneril, claiming that she finds that
Goneril “names my very deed of love; only she comes too short”, a sign that Lear’s
competitive-based parenting has been rooted in Regan’s beliefs as well, as she tells Lear to
“prize me at her worth”, her being Goneril, judging her own identity and worthiness based on
how much more she deserves the bigger dowry than her sister. Lear does not stop them,
and rather rewards the two sisters for their flattery. The sisters are influenced to believe that
their self-worth needs to be fought for and judged on relativity rather than it being a natural
human right leads them to take drastic measures in the play later on, such as by teaming up
to dispose of Lear, or Goneril murdering Regan at the end of the play to take all the power
and Edmund for herself, all to feel a sense of worthiness through the possession of land and
power, just like how Lear does by dividing their dowry based on their alleged love.
Lear’s partial love towards Cordelia further contributes to the dysfunctional familial
relationships. After Goneril and Regan carry out their speeches, he asked Cordelia to “draw
a third more opulent than your sisters’”. This line once again shows him raising the stakes of
the competition even further, as well as showing how he loves Cordelia more than the rest of
his daughters. Compared to Regan, whom he just called his “Our dearest Regan”, Lear
deliberately puts Cordelia on a pedestal, believing that she will be the one who can impress
him with her words the most. With competition being such an important part of his view on
love, the one he holds the most hopes for equates to the one that he loves the most. This
line is also said when Goneril and Regan are still present and listening on, implying that no
matter how much they try to fight for their father’s attention, most of his love is still going to
their younger sister. Even before this scene, Goneril and Regan know that the favouritism is
rampant in their family, with Goneril commenting “He always loved our sister most”, showing
just how deep it is hammered into their psyche. This causes the break in their relationship,
where Cordelia says “I know what you are, and like a sister am most loath to call” as she is
being exiled in the end of Act 1 Scene 1, directly professing the distaste the sisters hold
amongst themselves, which is a key consequence following dysfunctional parenting.
This partial love, however, also drives Cordelia to her demise. As Lear holds high hopes for
Cordelia and expects her to reciprocate his feelings in even more decorated words than
Goneril and Regan, he becomes furious when Cordelia claims she has “Nothing” to say.
Through her asides, it is seen that Cordelia does not believe that love should be judged
through outward acts like excessive fawning, believing that her love’s “more ponderous than
my tongue”, meaning that it reaches further and deeper than words can express, a stark
contrast to Lear’s love, which leads to him believing that Cordelia had completely betrayed
her and has never loved him after everything he has done for her. The irony of him believing
that Cordelia was more “opulent” than the others, only to call her “a stranger to my heart”
and to be “well neighbored, pitied, and relieved” somewhere else shows Cordelia’s fall in
status, as she has gone from a figure Lear believed had abilities above all other to someone
who needs to be taken in and be married with out of pity and not for love.
Overall, Act 1 Scene 1 is one of the main scenes that displays Lear’s dysfunctional parenting
in terms of ranking his daughters and pitting them against each other, nurturing a hostile
environment that eventually drives all three of them away, mentally for Goneril and Regan,
and physically for Cordelia, effectively ruining his relationship with the closest people in the
family.
Lear is also selfish and stubborn, often disrespecting people for the sake of having his own
way with things. Act 1 Scene 4 features Lear staying at Goneril’s house as a guest along
with his train of a hundred knights and squires, who are unruly and disruptive, to the point
that Goneril describes her house as a “brothel” or an “inn” under their influence, contrasting
the “honored place” a lady is supposed to live in. It is imperative to note that at this point of
the storyline, Lear still believes that Goneril and Regan love him, and he still sees them as
his daughters even if it is through materialistic love and a mind blinded by flattery. Goneril is
polite in her report about the knights, despite being furious about them. She still trusted that
Lear had good judgement as seen through how she believed that he would have found “a
safe redress”, as well as understanding that punishing the king’s train could be a great hit on
Lear’s honour, calling it “shame” but also a “necessity”.
Goneril may not be higher ranking than Lear, but Lear is living in her house, and considering
the father-daughter relationship that Lear believes they have he could have just berated his
knights and squires for the ruckus. Rather, Lear launches into a fit of rage, claiming that
“This is not Lear” as he could not possibly be ordered around. He asks many questions to
show his disbelief in the situation, such as asking Goneril, “What’s your name, dear lady?”
which calls back to when he had his final conversation with Cordelia, where he also uses
questions such as “Nothing?” and “But goes thy heart with this?”, and ends by calling her a
“stranger to my heart”, which can be seen here too when he feigns ignorance to Goneril’s
name. Lear sees any opposition towards him and his views from his daughters to be
uncharacteristic, as if they have changed as a person, rather than accepting that this is his
own fault. As Goneril stands her ground, Lear chooses to leave, calling her a “degenerate
bastard”. “Bastard” is both an insult in general and another word for an illegitimate child,
which means that like Cordelia, Lear has disowned her as well, with the same rundown, all
because Goneril asked him to discipline his train. His mind, corrupted by the power that he
holds, believes that defiance of any kind is an attack against him, and whoever does so does
not deserve to hold any ties with him.
All of this shows Goneril for one last time that her father truly does not love her, and hence
no matter what she does on her reign of terror, she holds no remorse, for she lived most of
her life as less than Cordelia, and now she lives the next part of it less than her father’s
riotous subjects. Lear’s parenting drives Goneril into worse decisions, even if he was given
chances to turn it around.
Lear’s stubbornness comes with his childishness, which leads to a toxic family dynamic
where he parentifies his daughters. The reversal of roles exposes Lear’s incompetency,
expecting to be parented by the ones he should be parenting. In Act 1 Scene 4, the Fool
quips that Goneril and Regan will make Lear an “obedient father”. This is a foreshadowing of
the role reversal that will happen in later scenes. Obedience is usually expected from
children by their own parents, and in this case Lear desires Goneril’s obedience towards him
regarding his knights and squires as well, mocking the irony of the reversal.
The true reversal occurs in Act 2 Scene 4, where Lear goes to find Regan for emotional
support, hoping that she can mediate the argument and avenge him for what Goneril has
done, as shown in the text “When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails she’ll flay thy
wolvish visage”, “she” referring to Regan. It is supposed to be a parent’s role to comfort their
children, not the other way round. The second Regan appears, Lear begins to vent to Regan
about his mistreatment. Regan’s response is very motherly and coaxing, using phrases like
“take patience”, and telling him off by saying “I pray you that to our sister you do make
return. Say you have wronged her, sir.”. Instead of Lear teaching Regan how to deal with
conflict, which he has obviously failed at as seen in her horrendous acts in the rest of the
play, Regan is the one who has to encourage him to be gentle, to apologize to Goneril whom
he has actually offended. More irony enters as Lear says “Thou better know’st the offices of
nature, bond of childhood, effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude.”, as he claims that the
current role reversal is what he sees as a daughter’s rightful role, and he sees babying him
and letting him has his way like a mother spoiling a child to be the correct way he should be
treated, further bringing out his childishness and the reversal in roles. All of this is done while
he continues to compare Goneril and Regan, saying the former’s eyes are “fierce” but
Regan’s “do comfort and do not burn”, once again trying to put the two sisters on different
sides of an argument, attempting to tear apart their relationship with his own hands just to
gain Regan’s support. He is actively turning this familial relationship dysfunctional, and in the
end the two sisters do end up standing against each other for Edmund, and Regan dies
under Goneril’s hand, their entire cooperation being built on nothing but the desire for power
and land to fill the hole in their self worth that their father dug.
Lear is a father who plays favourites, is disrespectful, and is childish, and these three traits
directly affect the three sisters’ lives and relationships in a negative manner, ruining their
lives and in the end also his own.
REFERENCE LIST:
Dysfunctional parenting. (n.d.). Psychology Today.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/parenting/dysfunctional-parentin
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Clover Autrey: King Lear ~Sibling rivalry rooted in poor parenting. (n.d.).
https://www.cloverautrey.com/2020/06/king-lear-sibling-rivalry-rooted-in.html
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