Shakespeare uses this technique of making his audience feel that they are detached from the scenes they are watching as he makes Cordelia die in the end and he makes King Lear feel his sadness and loneliness. The audience feels pity in a certain way for King Lear and watches his downfall with a critical eye. They do not feel related to him and at the end when Cordelia dies there is a certain feeling of shock that can arise in them as they did not perhaps expect that such a virtuous daughter could die. This in a way make the audience feels that what they are seeing is not reality and that it is merely a comment or a lesson to be learned from the play:
“King Lear inspires many philosophical questions; chief among them is the existence of divine justice. This concept was particularly important during the Elizabethan era, because religion played such a significant role in everyday life but throughout King Lear, good does not triumph without honorable characters suffering terrible loss. In fact, at the play’s conclusion, many of the good characters lie dead on the stage—Lear, Gloucester, and Cordelia. In addition, the audience hears that Kent will soon die, and the Fool has earlier disappeared, presumably to die. Of course, the evil characters are also dead, but their punishment is to be expected according to the laws of divine justice.” This in a way alienates the audience from the expected sense of justice which should have occurred where the good characters live happily ever after and the audience is faced with this situation of sacrifice of good characters.
Another point where King Lear could be considered a novel where there is the theme of alienation is when King Lear disowns his daughter Cordelia. He is in a way alienating his own daughter from him. His rejection of her true and simple love and for his vanity, wanting his daughter to flatter him causes the alienation of his daughter. Cordelia’s love for him is pure and she is sent away from the kingdom. She is being alienated from the world she has always known and from the father she thought that she knew, as King Lear, the strong ruler becomes a complete stranger for her when she is banished. Cornelia feels alienated and has in a way a sense of not belonging to King Lear’s kingdom and not being familiar to her father or her sisters or even her fiancé’s behaviors when she is banished as they all abandon her.
King Lear himself becomes alienated when he is sent out of his kingdom. He becomes physically alienated from the kingdom which had alienated his daughter from him. He later on goes further down and becomes alienated from his own existence and from his mental capacities when he goes mad as “he has lost those that he perceived as loving, and despite being accompanied by the Fool and Kent, Lear is more alone than he has ever been. The daughters he thought who loved him abandoned him and have taken his kingdom. The daughter who truly loved him was banished by his irrationality; Lear is alone”. He becomes alienated from the world he perceived as reality and after being alienated, he can now see the real reality that has eluded him from the beginning. He wants to escape the reality that his nature in a way does not permit him to accept and he starts feeling anxious and being uncertain about his own life thus feeling angst.
He becomes so alienated with reality that on meeting Cordelia he thinks that she is an angel and later, on recovering he prefers to stay in prison than live freely and talk to his daughters. He is alienated from his own daughters as what he thought them to be they were not. He is unable to digest the fact that his living has become futile and that he has become alienated from ‘living’ itself: “The human condition is a bare, harsh, and lonely existence, which Lear brilliantly illustrates. Existence for Lear is similar to that of a great oak tree, at one point filled with life; however, the human condition will not allow that oak to escape existence forever. It is only a matter of time before the leaves fall off and nothing remains but the skeleton of a tree once filled with ripeness. The skeleton is now open to the harsh cold winds of existence:”“In the twentieth century, feelings of alienation and absurdity have arisen that tend to shift the focus to King Lear. All virtuous or evil actions, all acceptances or rejections of religious or political ideology seem equally absurd” [10]
King Lear’s madness shows his alienation from the his own self as he is unable to bear the reality of what has happened to him and the guilt of having banished Cordelia. He also becomes spiritually alienated when: “He believes that he can find substance in forgiveness, prayer, and companionship; his angst causes him to believe that he can contemplate the mysterious nature of God.” He becomes alienated from his knowledge of the existence of god when at last he has to gain consciousness: “of the violent indifference of nature is consciousness of a godless world. Good is absent in the Lear universe; nature rages upon him and he suffers”
Another play which has can be studied under the theme of alienation is The Jew of Malta, usually ascribed to Christopher Marlowe.: “Its chief character, Barabas, is an uninhibited exaggeration of the villainous Jew: He walks abroad at night poisoning wells for the sheer, gleeful pleasure of it; he poisons his own daughter for becoming a Christian nun. His cunning malice, comic in its sheer extremity, knows no bounds; “
Marlowe's play, which was first performed in 1591, portrays the character of Barabas who is a very rich Jewish merchant and who lives in Malta. He has a daughter who is in love with a Christian. : “In the play, he is angered by the passage of a law requiring all Jews to either convert to Christianity or give up one half of their wealth.” Barabas is wicked and him possessing great wealth makes him more dominant than kings. He is sinful and commits various crimes for the idea of revenge towards the person who has stolen his gold” “He resorts to murder and treason to gain his revenge and enjoys watching the pain and suffering he has caused”
The theme of alienation could be firstly portrayed her by the fact that Barabas is made to be an ‘alien’ in the Malta. Barabas is made to struggle in a way to get accepted in this society where he is only a stranger, an alien because he does not belong to the same ‘race’ as: “Marlowe's realization of Barabas in the chapter on The Jew of Malta, and this helps to illuminate the roles characters adopt in the play and the extent to which they might all be seen as "aliens" struggling to assert primacy in unfamiliar locations”. According to Bartels, Barabas demonization is made for the purpose of alienating him further from the civilized world of the imperialist so that the greatness of the imperialist’s culture is shown as compared to the alienated Barabas’s culture. “Marlowe's representation of the "alien" reveals the ways in which "others" are demonized for purposes of self-authorization, and in a demonstration of this process she considers the beginnings of English imperialism,” Barabas by the simple fact that he has been born Jew cannot integrate the society and live respectably among others. They treat him as an ‘alien’ where if he does not change his own religion or give the Christians his money and adapt to their own ways, they would always regard him with contempt.
Barabas is made to be alienated from the society because of his religion. He is not accepted as someone who is part of the society but is instead regarded as a stranger. Barabas is thus made to follow a religion which the Elizabethan audience was not familiar with: “The English of the late sixteenth century believed that Christianity was the only true religion, and that the social order was ordained by God. The individual who set himself against the establishment could only be a source of disruption or, at worst, evil. Since Jews did not believe in Christianity, they were a threat to the social order” since they followed Christianity thus further alienating his character. The Jews were normally associated with Judas, the one who has led to the crucifixion of Jesus, thus when Barabas’s character was presented to the Elizabethan audience as one of complete cruelty as they were expecting, they stayed encored in their beliefs that this was reality and thus they were being alienated in a way from the truth that not all Jews are malevolent. They remained ignorant or alienated from the truth in further believing that what was portrayed on stage was a reflection of the real Jew.
Barabas alienates himself physically and mentally from the society through his hated of the Christians and his need to take revenge on them. His resorting to killing his own daughter shows that he is alienated from the moral righteous self and that he is moving further down the road of alienation from the society who already considers that he is a demon. His ambition and need for power makes him commit crimes. He alienates himself from the society in which he was living by being evil as if he was a good and generous man despite being a Jew, people who did not firmly believe that all Jews were evil could in a sense have accepted him but by being ambitious and revengeful he becomes a further ‘alien’“. In Christopher Marlowe's The, Jew of Malta, Barabas was by nature ambitious, but most of his actions were the result of a desire for revenge. His enemies blocked his ambition, so he turned to retaliation Barabas describes his character to the audience thus: Now will I show myself to have more of the serpent than
the dove; that is, more knave than fool.
(The Jew of Malta, 2.3.36-37) .
“Marlowe through various factors tries to prove that the Jews are ‘aliens’ in the imperial society and he constantly uses the symbol of the nose to portray that they do not belong here: “Marlowe is undoubtedly playing on Jewish stereotypes with this unconventional symbol. The fact that Ithamore focuses on barabas ' nose symbolizes his need to define the Jew as different, through selecting this feature as a mark of distinction. By saying that Barabas has a nose for crime, Ithamore is somehow connecting what he perceives to be a Jewish identity with a criminal identity.”
Barabas is made by Marlowe to be alienated from faith in the terrestrial world when he loses his gold: “Gold symbolizes faith in the terrestrial world—its schemes, profits and rewards—as opposed to the spiritual realm's less immediate rewards” Barabas thinks that if he has that gold, he is powerful and on lost of it he feels alienated as he cannot accept the reality that he will no longer have that power. He is alienated from basis standard ethics and moral values as he does not seem to be able to control his revengeful nature. He seems unable to distinguish between good and evil and alienates himself from the right moral values.
King Lear by Shakespeare and the Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlow have in a sense, different ways of presenting the theme of alienation of their characters. For King Lear, madness and disillusionment is the main cause for alienation and this alienation is used as a means for the king to see reality and to ask for redemption. It is only from alienating himself from others and his own self that king Lear can reach the stage of true knowledge and can repent for his deeds. In the Jew of Malta the alienation of Barabas by the society further pushes him down the road of evil and moral alienation instead of redemption. He does not feel the need to make himself more trustworthy and a better person and instead of trying to show to the audience that he can be good and that they treating him as an alien is wrong, he feels enraged and commits crimes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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Shakespeare, William. King lear. Ed. David Bevington. New York:
Longman, 1997.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. New York longman, 1997.
Classic guides the Jew of Malta. Ed. Penguin
