King Lear's Tragic World and the Audience's Response to It

King Lear cannot help filling the audience with a sense of helplessness and misery. Such a sense is so strong that it is often said that the world of King Lear is absurd and grotesque and that no indication of salvation is implied. The exteme example of such a view of King Lear is found in Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Comtemporay. The present writer, however, feels that the audience can see man's existence as something not easily over come by the apparently absolute evil powers of King Lear's world, in spite of the almost overwhelming impression of the miserableness of this world. This paper tries to justify the audience's impression by examining the audience's impression by examining the audience's response toward the development of the play. At the beginning of the play the audience feels an antipathy towards Lear who has expelled Cordelia and Kent, and the antipathy persists till the end of the second act. The cruel treatment of Lear by Goneril and Regan seems to justify this antipathy on the part of audience. But the antipathy disappears when the audience feels that Lear suffers much more than he justly deserves in the storm. Besides, he sees Glucester, who has committed no such great foolish act as Lear, being robbed of the sight of both eyes in spite of his good deed of saving Lear's life. In addition, the audience sees the innocent Edger suffer from Edmund's evil, and is forced to experience, at least, four 'worst' shocks from Edgar's meeting blind Gloucester to the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. These shocks intensify the audience's impression of the miserable world of the present play. Nevertheless, the audience does feel something possitive about the play as we see from the criticism of A. C. Bradley, R. B. Heilman, and G. W. Knight, who agree in seeing King Lear as a play dealing with the purgation of the soul of the suffered. The present writer deals with the question of positive feeling on the part of the audience in terms of the ways in which Lear, Gloucester, and Edgar endure the almost unbearable affliction of the unfeeling hostile world. Lear and Gloucester are the men who bear the affliction 'till it do cry out itself "Enough, enough," and die.' Edgar, in spite of the absurd blows of his misfortune, never gives up the will to live, and lives to know the way of dying 'hourly' rather than dying 'at once.' By seeing such people's tragic careers, the audience feels something positive about the play