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.