Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

King Lear

When we first see King Lear, he is not a lunatic, although in his lack of judgment, the

excitability of his nerves, and his hasty yielding to passion, we discover a decided

predisposition to insanity (Mabillard, 2011). Regarding the trial of his daughters as a

fabrication of a sane mind, one must deduce that Lear’s character is prone to some form of a

power complex, and that the subsequent actions of Lear throughout the play are a toxic

combination of pre-existing flaws and the deteriorating of his mental state. Lear is already on

the way to an unsound state of mind which "not alone the imperfections of long engrafted

condition” have been urging him (Appendix 2) . Resultantly, it may be observed that Lear’s has

divided his kingdom prior to the “trial”, which then, was a trick to entrap his daughters into a

profession of love and attachment to him. Cordelia's opposition to this was wholly unexpected,

as of the three, Cordelia truly loves her father, and is his favoured child.

Furthermore, Cordelia is the only of Lear’s daughters without malicious intent towards her

father, as Regan and Goneril’s concealed objective is disclosed (MN, 2002). In this opening

scene, there is a suggestion that the court suspects the deterioration of Lear’s mental state, as

even his closest friend, the Duke of Kent, notes Lear’s “hideous rashness" (Appendix 1) in his

execution of the trial, and hostility towards Cordelia. Cordelia herself is distraught throughout

the play, distracted by grief, fear, and adrenaline; yet even she – fraught with love – comes to

realise her beloved father is “as mad as the vexed sea” (Appendix 4).

In King Lear , Shakespeare explored one of the most prevalent forms of mental deterioration,

age-induced dementia. In Elizabethan times, it was understood that those who lived to the

elderly period of life often became ‘frantic’ with age, and receded into a state of internal decay

(Tosh, 2016). At the time, historical medical theory offered no answer as to why aged brains

began to fail. Shakespeare’s Lear suffers from the “unruly waywardness that infirm and

Extended Essay

ENGLISH A1

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