After having finished reading Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear, I felt as if my classroom was literally at a loss for words, as if such intense and raw suffering almost rendered the hearer speechless. Lear's characters go through unspeakable suffering and immense tragedy. At the close of the play, it was hard to see a light of hope through the dim and dismal end. Lear has lost virtually everything, inlcuding the one soul who may have unconditionally loved him (Cordelia, his daughter), Gloucester is blind, and suicidal, (and after a heart attack upon Edgar's revealing of his idenity, very much dead) Regan poisoned by her own sister, Goneril dead by her own hand and Edmund slain by his own brother. I could even venture to say that Lear dies from a broken heart, snapped in two by the shear magnitude of his suffering. I was trying to ask myself, or rather, come to grips with the fact that after such misfortune, none of these characters truly became better individuals. Kent was left broken and desolate, his leader and beacon dead and gone, and Edgar and Albany, left with a war-torn kingdom to rebuild. How could anyone judge these people fairy after having witnessed all that they had gone through? Had they not acted according to the consequences of tragedy? Lear ultimately goes mad, but how can one hold him accountable after watching his fairest and youngest daughter die before him? If the question at hand is, "does suffering truly bring out the truest reflection of one's character and indenity", I would be led to believe that for the characters in Lear, it ruins them. It reveals the most distorted, the ugliest and darkest aspects of our nature. Ah yes-nature- Edmund, who "reconciles" himself after having been mortally wounded, tries to save Lear and Cordelia but, alas, acts too late. It can be argued in two ways: Edmund, rose to the occassion and acted out in his most compassionate and heroic nature, or, knew he had nothing more to gain or lose and acted to the very end selfishly. For Lear, I have come to the conclusion that the affects of suffering has every potential to bring forth an ugly and gross side of our humanity, but I suppose the optimist in me cannot leave it at just that. I do believe Edmund saw the hero in himself. I do believe that in the moment of his crisis he contained in himself a glimmer of compassion. I have to. Because if the world truly worked that way, that suffering was this corrosive, oppressive force that led everybody to corruption and destruction, I cannot concieve that would have made it even this far.
