In Act 4, Scene 1 Lear asks the fool if he is a fool: “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” The Fool: “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.” Here the Fool is trying to say that he gave away all his power, and now the only title he has left now is being a fool. Gradually Lear becomes aware of his folly in Act 2, Scene 4. “O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!”. “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, thy elements below. Where is this daughter?” – He’s done a stupid thing and now it starts to affect him physically.
Development to Lear’s insanity occurs in the storm scene (Act 2, Scene 4). “I have full cause of weeping. O fool, I shall go mad!” The storm is a symbol of his deteriorating emotional state. He is lost in the storm and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do or what he’s doing. “I will do such things – what they are, yet I know not; but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” (Act 2, Scene 4). Through this extreme emotional turmoil, Lear comes out the ‘other’ side with increased self awareness of the world, his self, and others.
Madness for Lear is a phase and progression through which he develops into a new person, a better person. He is delusional at the end of the play when he thinks Cordelia is still breathing, “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips, look there.” (Act 5, Scene 3).
While he rages against the elements, the mock trial of Goneril and Regan in the hovel is madness in the sense of his bitter anger at the injustices of the world; a venting of his rage. And he speaks the truth. “I am a man more sinned against than sinning”. “Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man, that will with two pernicious daughters”. It is almost as if Shakespeare were saying that in order to achieve a sane and balanced vision of a mad world, one must go mad oneself.
From the beginning of Lear’s power, to his climax of insanity, he never quite makes it fully back up to the top after he reconciles with Cordelia, making King Lear one of Shakespeare’s ultimate tragedies - the forces that drove Lear mad in the first place cannot be undone.
