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Fate in King Lear
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“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we
will.” These words from Hamlet are echoed, even more pessimistically, in
Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of King Lear where Gloucester says:
“Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their
sport”. In Lear, the characters are subjected to the various tragedies of
life over and over again.
An abundance of cyclic imagery in Lear shows that good people are
abused and wronged regardless of their own noble deeds or intentions.
Strapped to a wheel of fire, humans suffer and endure, prosper and decline,
their very existence imaged as a voyage out and a return. The movement
from childhood to age and back again, the many references to fortune whose
wheel spins humans downward even as it lifts, the abundance of natural
cycles which are seen as controlling experience, even perhaps the movement
of play itself from order to chaos to restoration of order to division
again.
Throughout the text, the movements of celestial bodies are used to
account for human action and misfortune. Just as the stars in their
courses are fixed in the skies, so do the characters view their lives as
caught in a pattern they have no power to change. Lear sets the play in
motion in banishing Cordelia when he swears “by all the operation of the
orbs from whom we exist and cease to be” that his decision “shall not be
revoked”. How like the scene in Julius Caesar wherein Caesar says “For I
am constant as the Northern star” Lear vows to be resolute but dies
regretting his decision at the hands of his daughters who claim love him
“more than word can wield” and are “alone felicitate” in his presence.
That Edmund disbelieves in the influence of the stars adds to the
play’s recurring theme that part of our fate is our character; that we
choose our lot in life by how we choose to act. Similarly, in Lear
Gloucester’s feelings predict what is to come when he says “These late
eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good…” And because of this
Gloucester begins to envision a world where “Love cools, friendship falls
off, brothers divide…” While his father misunderstands the importance
of the celestial bodies, his bastard son, Edmund denies the importance of
the movements of the heavenly bodies. He calls it “an excellent foppery”
to “make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars.” (Just as in
Julius Caesar we learn that “… The fault .
