There are two types of blindness in Shakespeare` s tragedy King Lear the physical one - that of Gloucester and the metaphorical blindness of both Gl. and Lear who cannot recognize the lies and flatteries they are swept with. They lack vision for the truth and gain insight of it only after great suffering.
King Lear is a brutal play, filled with human cruelty and awful disasters. The aging king is dazzled by the kind words of his two daughters Goneril and Regan who flatter him outrageously, while his third daughter Cordelia refuses to be such a sycophant. She loves her father very much and considers it humiliating to copy his sisters manner. She remains true to herself. However, her father fails to see her sincerity he is blind to it, he expects beautiful words of love and loyalty and when she refuses to offer them the old king furiously banishes her.
The two elderly characters who suffer the most in the tragedy are Lear and Gloucester. Their stories are similar in many ways. Lear realizes only as he begins to go mad that Cordelia loves him and that Goneril and Regan are treacherous flatterers. Similarly Gloucester comes to understand which son is really good and which is bad at the very moment of his blinding. Still, both Lear and Gloucester sink into despair before their deaths.
In the desert storm, which powerfully symbolizes the chaos in the old king` s mind, he finds out the truth. He understands that a person cannot express his feelings in words, that it is more important what you think, not what you say.
Even as he challenges the storm, Lear recognizes his own mortality and human frailty perhaps for the first time, but the irony is that his eyesight fails in the moments just before he dies.( In a flash of irony of fate when they can no more see with their eyes, they become capable of seeing and feeling with their souls)
In conclusion King Lear is an edifying play about human relationships and real love, about lies, hypocrisy and greed. Besides, it is a brilliant example of how unfortunate and even disastrous a persons delusion can be.
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