Humans And Animals In King Lear

Scattered throughout Shakespeare’s King Lear are references to animals. These references serve as points of comparison, and affinity, with the human animal.

The purpose of these references is to highlight human existence on the appetitive level – that which solely feeds and nurtures the body, without concern for concepts that drive human society, such as ethics and morality.

In fact, it is for this very reason that Lear is turned out into the wild heath, very much like a feral beast, wherein he can enact his tragedy, free from all associations with the constructs of civilization.

In effect, the animal references in King Lear emphasize humankind’s affinity with all living things, in that each of us is involved in a cycle – birth, begetting offspring, death – life outside civilization, life as the instinctual drive to breed and survive.

As well, it is important to realize that human society is also a construct of superfluity in that human beings tend to accumulate wealth and power, without thinking about why they need to carry on in this way.

This is precisely the painful lesson that Lear learns on the heath. He has been turned out into the storm like some mad, unwanted animal. He, the king, is powerless before nature. All his wealth, all his influence, even his fifty companions that he kept with him at all times as a show of his might – are all stripped away. On the heath, he is no more than a lost, old man whom no one wants.

Interestingly enough, Lear the king, living in his court, was more appetitive, more driven by his own sense of power (since he could make or break the lives of his daughter, especially Cordelia) – more like an animal – than the human being that he becomes on the heath.

It is by suffering like a wretched animal, by being cast to the very lowest level of subsistence, that Lear learns about truth of a human life, indeed the value of a human life. It by suffering that he undergoes purification, where all superfluity is stripped from him, and he becomes a man that finally understands the value of love and compassion. And the animals teach this lesson to him:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just (III.iv.28-36).

Despite the darkness that pervades the entire play, King Lear is about the discovery of love. All too often a lifetime will go by before we understand the reality of love.

In fact, the entire play is structured around the idea of inversion – things that we assume are normal and therefore proper (such as Lear the King parceling out his kingdom to the daughter who loves him the most) – are twisted and inherently wrong, if not evil.

By his own action, by trying to see which daughter loves him the most, Lear unleashes the tragedy that shall consume in the end. Lear the “wise, old king” is in fact a foolish old man – for he actually believes he can discern true love by initiating a game – “Let’s play who loves Dad the most.”

But Cordelia refuses to play. She knows that true love is not contained in mere words, but is in fact found in actions and deeds – something Lear himself bitterly learns:

No, no, no, no! Come let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too –
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out (V.iii.8-15).

Birds in a cage are freer than kings at court. They are completely without guile and deception. The inversion continues, for the cage is the freest place for Lear; it is there he finds truth, and it is there that he finds true love that Cordelia bears for him.

Of course, it is in the nature of Shakespearean tragedy that death comes precisely – and only – when complete realization is achieved and truth laid bare.

Thus, when Lear finds Cordelia, it is too late. Death takes away the very person that Lear sought throughout the play – someone who would love him without hope for reward.

And it is at this very juncture that we have the strongest evocation of the parallel between human existence and animals – for as living creatures we share the same fate – some will die soon, others a little later, but human and animals – indeed all life – is bound to the cycle of life and death:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never (V.iii.307-309).

The finality of “Never” rings like a knell upon all human hopes to be greater and higher than what we really are – human animals. It is this question that Kent asks as he sees Lear carry in the dead Ophelia: “Is this the promis’d end” (V.iii.265).

When the play ends, we must answer Kent and say, “Yes. This is the promised end – for death makes animals of us all.” And it is to Kent that we must leave the final word: “Break, heart, I prithee, break”(V.iii.314).

 

The photo shows, “Cordelia’s Farewell,” by Edwin Austin Abbey, painted in 1898.

War In Two Works

“They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.” This sentence encapsulates the contradictory posture that war imposes on human beings, and this contradiction leads to the recognition that war itself is an absurd act, bereft of any meaning, and existing solely for its own sake.

Thus, war can only invoke and provoke a bleak vision, and an absurdist response, which forms the basis of both Fernando Arrabal’s “Picnic on the Battlefield,” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” In fact, both these works explore the theme of war as an absurd act, in which meaning of any sort cannot possibly exist.

Arrabal’s Picnic on the Battlefield explores this absurdity to the fullest by working on a premise that is both laughable and grotesque. First, there is the improbable appearance of Zapo’s parents on the battlefield, who have come out to have a picnic with their son.

War for them is nothing more than some field outing that their son is on, and they have decided to join him. When the reality of war is brought home to the parents, Monsieur Tépan asks: “But why are you enemies?”

Suddenly, through the shared suffering (the bomb attack), there is some sort of realization that Zepo is a mirror image of his own son Zapo; there is no difference between them.

But this realization is quickly swallowed up Madame Tépan’s remark: “Your father is the only whose capable of thinking such ideas; don’t forget he’s a former student of the Ecole Normale and a philatelist.”

This remark reinforces the absurdist view that there cannot be such realizations in war – there is only the enemy which one must try to kill. In war, there is only kill-or-be-killed.

This is why Madame Tépan’s remark is so efficient at cutting away any meaning that one may seek to give to war – for war is entirely a meaningless act. Thus, the absurdity is heightened by the fact that the play ends with the death of the four characters who have suddenly hit upon the idea of ending the war by refusing to fight.

Instead they dance (a life-affirming act); and it is exactly at this point – a point in which they have achieved a semblance of meaning and harmony that war intervenes and they killed. War can only be an absurd nightmare, from which few escape.

This sense of absurdity continues in Tim O’Brien’s story, “The Things They Carried,” in that it too describes the nightmarish quality of war, in which to kill is a normal act, and the days in which does not kill are abnormal. Only death has true meaning in war: “The guy’s dead…which seemed profound – the guy’s dead…” And death brings no final meaning, no moral, as Sanders asks, but finds none: “Yeah well…I don’t see no moral.”

Cross and his men live in a landscape of nothingness, and when they die, it is an even greater, vaster nothingness. All the soldiers are entirely cut off from all meaning – their sole purpose is to survive. It is a realization that Cross comes to at the end of the end of the story.

War is no place for idealism. Martha is not a virgin, nor does she love him; she just offers him a semblance of an imagined world outside Vietnam. But like everything else around Cross, she is nothing more than a daydream – perhaps she is part of the nightmare.

Cross comes to this realization, but he is not moved by it. He notes that it is sad – but he has the work of surviving to do; he cannot wallow in self-pity: “He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach.”

Thus, it is not the soldiers who will change the environment around them, but the environment that changes the soldiers, for they are “trying to fight and survive in the human waste that surrounds them…[and] they are themselves human waste.”

For Arrabal war is grotesque and meaningless and exists only to perpetuate destruction and annihilation. Likewise, O’Brien also writes about the absurdity of war, where humanity itself is continually denied, and where there is no room for life and love – only the will to survive, and the will to kill: “He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness or stupidity.”

 

The photo shows, “Gassed,” by John Singer Sargent, painted in 1919.

Thoughts On Two Plays By Shakespeare

William Shakespeare’s two plays, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing, both express similar ideas, but the results are the exact opposite.

In Hamlet, we see deception, malice, intrigue and lies leads to death and great tragedy, while the same sort of things lead to marriage, happiness and comedy in Much Ado About Nothing.

The reason for this difference lies in the fact that both plays use these strategies in a completely opposite way. In Hamlet, deception, intrigue, malice and lies are used to further revenge; while in Much Ado About Nothing these same elements are used to ensnare lovers, and the entire façade is nothing more than a game.

Therefore, it is the result of these strategies that determine how each play will turn out, whether it will be a tragedy, or a comedy.

In Much Ado About Nothing, there is of course endless deception. Both Claudio and Don Pedro are deceived, and this leads to Hero’s discredit, but this dishonor is overcome by the lie of her death.

And by way of this death, she is reborn, or resurrected into a state of redemption, where she becomes part of her lover, Claudio.

This intrigue is mirrored in a more comic way by Beatrice and Benedick, both of whom are fooled into thinking that the one loves the other, and because of this pretense they actually do fall in love. In both of these instances, we find that deception is merely a means to an end – to gain love and happiness.

However, it is important to realize that even in this comedy, there is good deception as well as bad. For instance, when Claudio declares his intention of wooing Hero, Don Pedro decides that he will help Claudio, and he woos Hero on behalf of Claudio.

This only leads to a mix-up of intentions, because Claudio (encouraged by Don John) now comes to believe that Don Pedro has betrayed him. Suddenly, the illusions have become reality, and reality has become an illusion, and the characters have a hard time keeping the two apart.

As well, during the ball, Beatrice and Benedick flirt with each other, while pretending they do not know who is behind the mask.

The deception becomes evil, or sinister, after Claudio rejects Hero, and her family announces that she is dead; this is done to punish Claudio.

Full of remorse, Claudio tries to make amends, and comes to Leonato in order to marry his niece, who is actually Hero. But suddenly, a group of masked people enter and force Claudio to marry while blindfolded. This points to the saying that love is blind.

But strangely, this method of marrying suggests that it is no longer a matter of love, but an attempt at redemption on behalf of Claudio, who says: “Which is the lady I must seize upon?”(V.iv.53).

Therefore, deception is an illusion that brings characters to the brink of disaster, to tragedy, but then veers away and returns to reconstruct reality back into what it was, and in this reality, the lovers find happiness and true love.

This allows for Claudio and Hero is be who they really – lovers. In fact, tragedy is avoided precisely because deception has not been allowed to play itself out entirely.

There comes a time for unmasking, when truth is revealed. And when truth is revealed it brings great happiness and joy, as Benedick says: “Come, come we are friends: let’s have a dance ere we are married that we may lighten our own hearts…”(V.iv.120ff).

The mood is entirely different in Hamlet. Again we have deception and lies, but the outcome is tragedy and not happiness.

The reason for this lies in the fact that where in Much Ado About Nothing the attempt was to find a wife, in Hamlet the attempt is get revenge.

In Hamlet too there is much masking, where people hide their true intents, chief among them being Hamlet himself, who hides his true feelings in order to spur himself into action.

In fact, the only truthful person in the entire play is Ophelia, who never swerves in her love for Hamlet; it is only he who thrusts her away. He does this in order to make sure that nothing will hinder him as he seeks his goal – revenge for his dead father.

In fact, he tells Ophelia: “You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish it: I loved you not”(III.i.119-120).

This revelation is also a lie that Hamlet tells in order to get rid of Ophelia. As in Much Ado About Nothing, deception does have its own results. In the comedy, there was a brief dark period, when Claudio feels remorse for causing the supposed death of Hero.

But in Hamlet, the death is very real – for it is Hamlet’s deception (his rejection of Ophelia) that ultimately kills her. The truth is that he does love her, but he must hide his love from everybody, in order to carry out the revenge that his father’s ghost has asked him to do.

Hamlet knows that he must deceive in order to get revenge. If he tells the truth, he will fail, because truth will force him to reveal what he wants to do.

This is why he assumes the role of the madman. But this madness is also a lie. It is important to note that the only truthful person in the entire play, Ophelia, is the one who is driven made because of lies and deception.

As the Prologue King states: “This world is not for aye, nor ‘tis not strange that even our loves should with our fortunes change”(III.ii.210-211).

Therefore, Hamlet is deceiving not to win the heart of Ophelia; in fact he is not interested in love: “Love! His affections do not that way tend,” observes Claudius (III.i.169).

Rather, he is deceiving in order to find the murderer of his father, and then give justice to the ghost of his dead father by executing the murderer.

Therefore, there is an entire detective story and a legal drama unfolding as well; and Hamlet must carry on both roles – the investigator and the avenger.

When he finally gets the chance to kill Claudius, he discovers that the force of revenge consumes not only the killer but also the avenger himself, and so when the play ends, the stage is literally littered with dead bodies: “Take up the bodies: such a sight as this becomes the field, but here shows much amiss,” states Horatio at the end (V.ii.412ff).

Thus, both Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet involve deception, lies and malice, and yet one play ends in love, happiness and marriage, while the other ends in death and bloodshed.

This is the result of the intended outcome of this deception. In the comedy, the outcome is to ensnare a lover; in the tragedy the outcome is to get revenge.

 

The photo shows, “Children acting the ‘Play Scene’ from Hamlet, Act II, scene ii,” by Charles Hunt, painted in 1863.