Animal Imagery - 57 different animals are mentioned in King Lear.

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

IMAGERY

ANIMAL IMAGERY

57 different animals are mentioned in King Lear. Dominant animal imagery is symbolic of the hierarchy and the dismissal of God’s law. The traditional order was:

God

Angels

Man

Animal

Plants

Stones

Animal imagery represents the breakdown of natural order and the savage instincts of certain evil characters. Therefore these evil characters are not obeying God’s law but behaving according to instinct. For example in Act I Scene 4, King Lear refers to Gonerill as possessing a “wolvish visage.” In a way the evil characters support Montaigne’s views, who questioned the natural order and believed man was not necessarily superior to animals. Animals of prey are used in the imagery, where the non-human nature world taking over, as the civilised world breaks down. This parallels with Montaigne because animal instincts overpower human instincts.

A.C. Bradley quotes:

“The lower animal souls have found a lodgement in human form and there found brains forge, tongue to speak, and hands to eat enormities.”

It is interesting to compare the animal imagery in King Lear to that in Othello. The two plays have certain likenesses; they were written together (Othello probably in 1604, and King Lear around 1605). Also they are the most painful of the great tragedies, and they are both studies of torture. However, torture in King Lear is so vast and so inhuman a scale, the cruelty of child to parent in the doubly repeated plot is so relentless and ferocious, that the jealous and petty malignity of Iago almost shrinks beside it. This difference in scale is expressed in the animal imagery. In Othello low type of life is used such as insects and reptiles, swarming and preying on eachother, not out of special ferocity, but just in accordance with their natural instincts, also mischievous and irresponsible wild cats, goats and monkey. This reflects and repeats the spectacle of the wanton torture of one human being by another, whereas in King Lear our imagination is filled with a accumulated pictures of active ferocity, of wolf, tiger, wild boar, vulture, serpeant and sea-monster- all animals of dignity and grandeur, though seen here only when their desires “are wolvish, bloody starved and raveness.” This represents the terrific scale of the suffering in King Lear, which makes us feel- as we never do in Othello that the vileness of humanity is so great, so unchecked and universal that if the gods do not intervene, the end of such horrors must come and “humanity must perforce prey n itslef like monsters of the deep” (Act 4Scene 2).

Therefore animal imagery is very significant.

SUFFERING

In the play we are conscious all through of the atmosphere of strain and strife, at moments of bodily tension to the point of agony. This is chiefly created by means of the verbs used, but also in metaphor, of a human body is anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the ??

Images and verbs, for every kind of bodily movement, generally involving pain is used to express mental and abstract, as well as physical facts.

For example:

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Therefore animal imagery is very significant.

SUFFERING

Images and verbs, for every kind of bodily movement, generally involving pain is used to express mental and abstract, as well as physical facts.

For example:

Lear in his agonised remorse, pictures himself as a man “wrenched and tortured by an “engine.”
Gonerill has the power to “shake” his manhood
King Lear complains Gonerill “struck him with her tongue.
Hot tears “break from him
Albany wonders how far Gonerill eyes will “pierce”
Gloucester’s “flaw’d heart” is cracked, and finally it “burst smilingly”

These are just a few.

Characters suffer from their own sins or because they are sinned against. Not only characters who suffer-?? State in disarray by the end of the play. The storm serves as a metaphor for England’s suffering as well as Lear’s.

Other imagery in King Lear includes clothing/nakedness (which creates the underlying question are you more with your culture’s clothing and the dignity they confer, or naked, owing nothing to anyone), justice (which Charlotte deals with), fortune (which asks what happens to us is just dumb luck or is it predestined and eyesight/blindness/hallucination (which we deal with next).

SIGHT AND BLINDNESS

Shakespeare uses blindness or lack of sight to symbolise people being metaphorically stripped of the titles, and logical thinking. Kent represents perception and logical reasoning when King Lear is in his “blind state.” The earliest references to eyes comes in Act I Scene 1, after King Lear has explained his “darker purpose” and failed to see the truth about his three daughters.

DIVISION

Division is a key theme in King Lear. The play charts the breakdown- not just of one character, but a whole way of life.

A mood of uncertainty is established in the first six lines of the play when we learn that King Lear plans to break out his state. There is a clear parallel between that of division and of disorder. For example, when Gloucester is in his vulnerable state he cries, “my old heart is cracked, cracked.” Also another example of division causing disorder is when in Act II there are hints that Regan and Gonerill are going to fight for power over the divider kingdom. The division of the kingdom has caused feuds within as well as disarray in the state. In dividing the kingdom Lear plunges his family and community into crisis. He allows a new breed of opportunists to undermine the hierarchy. In the opening of the scene of the play Lear ironically says, “we shall express our darker purpose,” referring to the division of the kingdom. This can be interpreted as a play on words and foreshadows he will plunge his kingdom into darkness.