Parallelism between Lear and Gloucester
When I first started reading King Lear, the major conflict that was staged was between Lear and
his daughters. As his oldest two daughters repeatedly mention, Cordelia was his
“favored” child. But because of his egotistically-driven need for affirmation
of his daughters’ love for him he finds himself lacking the very same love he
had so desired. As the play goes on, we notice a parallelism between Lear’s
conflict with his two daughters and Gloucester’s conflict with his son. Gloucester’s situation couldn’t be more alike Lear’s. Both
Gloucester and Lear are heavily manipulated by their children. The major
difference I saw in their situations, however, was that Lear set himself up for
the manipulation. He demanded that his daughters declare their love for him in
return for a reward.
As it is now, and probably was back during the time of
Shakespeare, most children would do, or say, anything to receive a reward-
especially one as big as a kingdom. Gloucester, on the other hand, is manipulated
by Edmund, his illegitimate son, into thinking that his first-born son Edgar is
trying to murder him. Even though Lear may have set himself up, and Gloucester
may have been innocent in this sense, they both made a fundamentally
destructive decision to disown their children who cared for them the most. Edgar
and Cordelia had nothing but loyalty and love for their fathers, but because of
their fathers’ blindness, they were living their lives fatherless.
In the end of the play, we see how both Lear and Gloucester
become aware of what is really going on with their families and all the
conflict surrounding them. Both Cordelia and Edgar still care about their
fathers despite the fact that they were disowned for no logical reason. I think
that’s where there is another parallel between Gloucester and Lear- they both
do not possess much logic. King Lear’s decisions were ego-driven, while
Gloucester’s decisions were fear-driven (disowning Edgar and listening to
Edmund’s claims about how his brother was trying to murder their father), but
they both did not possess basic reasoning skills to try to understand what was
going on in their situations.
After going back over the story and looking into certain
scenes more deeply, I have observed that Gloucester and Lear’s situations are
almost one and the same. The details may have been different, but I think
Shakespeare’s use of the parallelism was to amplify the themes he was trying to
convey. The subplot of Gloucester and his sons supports the main plot of Lear
and his daughters to a tee.
