King Lear Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

King Lear - Essay Example Lear inherited and perceived bad and good traits from both of them. The story of King Lear teaches us that the attaching of excessive importance to things in the material world causes passions and suffering. At the beginning the bad overwhelms in Lear’s character. We see Lear-despot. On the one hand his despotism origins from the feudal prerogative of a monarch. On the other one, being an outstanding person, surrounded by universal admiration, he gets a false idea that his royal dignity rests upon his personal superiority. Like the rest of the characters, Lear possesses a highly developed individualistic consciousness, which is a feature of the new psychology. Unfortunately, this awareness of personal dignity acquires one-sided, egoistic character, which reveals itself in excessively high estimation of the self, reaching the utmost degree of self-adoration. This feature was born by the social structure itself, where everybody praised his greatness, where everything seemed to happen according to his will. Believing that it is his personality that mattered, Lear loses his common sense and resigns his throne, sure that people won’t stop tremble for him. This crazy belief make s him hand the kingdom to his daughters, become a man without a title and experience all the woes associated with human life. In the course of the play we see, however, that Lear continues clutching at his feudal dignity. The perception of his being a king has strong roots in him and the habit of commanding the others does not leave him even when he, rejected and abandoned, wanders in the field. In delirium, he cries: â€Å"No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the king himself†; â€Å"Ay, every inch a king: When I do stare, see how the subject quakes† (IV, 6). His insanity lies in the fact hat he continues considering himself the king, the man standing above the rest, while the enlightment will come as he sees his