Fate in Shakespeares King Lear :: King Lear essays

Fate in King Lear         Theres a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how wewill.  These words from Hamlet atomic number 18 echoed, plain more pessimistically,  inShakespe ars fill, The Tragedy of King Lear where Gloucester saysLike flies to lite boys, argon we to the gods, they kill us for theirsport.  In Lear, the characters are subjected to the un akin tragedies of livelihood over and over again.         An abundance of cyclic imagery in Lear shows that good people areabused and wronged  regardless of their own portentous deeds or intentions.Strapped to a seethe of fire, humans suffer and endure, succeed and decline,their very existence imaged as a voyage out and a return.  The movementfrom childhood to age and back again, the many references to fortune whosewheel spins humans downward even as it lifts, the abundance of naturalcycles which are seen as controlling experience, eve n perhaps the movementof play itself from put together to chaos to restoration of order to divisionagain.         Throughout the text, the movements of aeriform bodies are used toaccount for human action and misfortune.  Just as the stars in theircourses are fixed in the skies, so do the characters view their lives ascaught in a pattern they have no power to change.  Lear sets the play inmotion in banishing Cordelia when he swears by all the achievement of theorbs from whom we exist and cease to be that his decision shall not berevoked.  How like the scene in Julius Caesar wherein Caesar says For Iam constant as the Yankee star   Lear vows to be resolute but diesregretting his decision at the pass on of his daughters who claim love himmore than word can wield and are alone felicitate in his presence.         That Edmund disbelieves in the influence of the stars adds to theplays recurring pennin g that part of our fate is our character that wechoose  our lot in life by how we choose to act.  Similarly, in LearGloucesters feelings predict what is to come when he says These new-madeeclipses of the sun and moon portend no good...     And because of thisGloucester begins to envision a human beings where Love cools, friendship fallsoff, brothers divide...   While his father misunderstands the importanceof the celestial bodies, his bastard son, Edmund denies the importance ofthe movements of the heavenly bodies.  He calls it an excellent fopperyto make conscience-smitten of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars.  (Just as inJulius Caesar  we learn that ... The fault .