Insight in Madness:
The Effects of King Lear’s Insanity
Mahnoor Afzal
AP Literature and Composition
Professor Dan Adrian
1 February 2019
Insight in Madness;
The Effects of King Lear’s Insanity
King Lear’s instability throughout this Shakespearean play uncovers darker truths that exposed himself and others around him in surprising clarity amid the madness. This insanity leads to a pivotal lucidity that almost changes King Lear for the better. From Shakespear’s tragedy “King Lear”, readers witnessed the tremendous effects that Lear’s insanity had on more than his own fragile mind. At length, this insanity allowed for him to not only see his past his ego to his own faults but shed light on the human soul once it has been stripped of everything and diminished the impacts of nature on the physical body and to a length bares the preventable suffering of his poorest subjects.
In Act 3, we see Lear venture haphazardly out into a great storm after his uncompromising stubbornness leads to him being barred from the castle by Reagan and Goneril. This slow crumbling of Lear’s peace comes to a peak in the storm. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow you cataracts and hurricanes… Vaunt-couriers of oak-clearing thunderbolts, Singe my white head!”(III, II, 1-6), he bellows in the storm. Here Lear is addressing the gods and is the drive to such a state of self-pity stemming not just from his daughters’ betrayals, but from the natural storm he is against, and causes him to become more animal than man. This mental derangement leads Lear to be alarmingly unaffected by this ferocious storm, which is at the forefront of his descent into madness. In Madness in Euripides, Shakespeare, and Kafka, Ruth Perry describes how “madness physically removes one from the world inhabited by other people” and makes Lear “unable to take in anything beyond the boundaries of [his] own skin” because of his distraction “by the memory of the injuries done to him that tumult inside of him” that distract him from any outside disturbances. This aspect of madness is the most obvious to those seeing Lear’s turmoil, but is only the beginning of the changes this disturbance brings to him.
One of the most vital shifts the mental derangement brings to Lear is in offering him surprising clarity and insight into not only his own faults, but how his kingdom as a whole was run. As King Lear is about to enter a hovel to take shelter from the storm, his party discovers Edgar in a raving lunatic state further gone than his own. Lear finds yet more reason in his insanity.
“Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated. man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come unbutton here.”(III, IV, 101-107)
In Ian Johnston lecture “Speak What We Feel: An Introduction to King Lear”, he reflects on how Lear’s “act of tearing off his clothes is the forcible rejection of the last element of civilized life which gives him a sense of who he is and where he belongs”. In this scene, Lear is literally uncovering his own human soul, as he is already bare of his previous status, power, familial ties, and now the last aspect, the very clothes that differentiate man from the animal are being torn off. Through this removal of everything Lear held dear, all that previously defined him, he gains valuable insight into not only human nature, but himself. Even near the end of his madness, there is a stark change present due to Lear’s journey after truly being bare of his position, power, and pride.
Near the end of the play, King Lear is left with only base humanness that allows him a greater humility than ever before. When King Lear encounters Cordelia, she stops him from kneeling and addressing him as sir, to which he replies “Pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish, fond old man,”(IV, VII, 59-60). This starkly contrasts with how Lear spoke to Cordelia in Act I when banishing her and lacks the ego and pride Lear once proudly carried. Although driven insane by his own inner turmoil, Lear’s lunacy brings him to a higher moral ground in which he is more sympathetic, kind, and patient. This is an immense shift from the prideful, vain, and cruel King who banished his favourite daughter because she failed to inflate his ego. At the beginning of the play, Lear commands “Give me the map there. Know that we have divided Into three our kingdom;” (I, I, 36-37). Now in Act 4, Lear asks Kent, “Am I in France?” to which he replies “In your own kingdom, sir” (I, I, 76-77). Heather Hirschfeld speaks to this in ‘Am I in France?’: King Lear and Source, describing it as a “special instance of this kind of distracted clarity” and represents the “reason in madness”.