King Lear suggests an answer to the perennial question that asks why God would allow pain

Seeing Love: A Reflection on King Lear

By Pete Jermann

What do we see? And what does it matter? As an older father and educator of my youngest daughter, now sixteen years old, I have the joy of truly learning Shakespeare for the first time. In recent months we have tackled two Shakespeare plays, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. One is billed as the greatest love story of all time and the other as one of the darkest and greatest tragedies of all time. But which is which?

Our modern world clearly considers the tale of frustrated young lovers the romance and the story of a king descendant the tragedy. But in Romeo and Juliet there is no love, only a pubescent-adolescent infatuation that ends without hope in the suicides of two children. There is no romance. Totally absent is the patter of two people coming to know one another. There is only the hormonal rush of physical attraction and the drive to climax. To live without real love and die without hope is the ultimate tragedy. On the other hand, the seemingly horrific King Lear is a love story from beginning to end. It is a about a man who runs from love but ultimately finds himself redeemed in the very love he ran from.

How we see does matter. To see Romeo and Juliet as a love story renders love puerile. To not see the love story in King Lear is tragic because we cannot encounter a love we do not wish to see. King Lear is about seeing and why it matters. It is the story of a man who literally asks for love and cannot see it in front of him. What follows is the reflection of a homeschooling father overwhelmed by the redemptive beauty he saw inKing Lear.

At the beginning of King Lear, an aged king, intent on retiring, asks his three daughters to describe their love for him. These declarations will determine how his kingdom will be split among them. His two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, proceed to shamelessly flatter him. But the youngest, Cordelia, the one who truly loves him, tells him she has “nothing.” The honesty of this answer lies not in her lack of words, but in the fact that in asking to be flattered he truly asks for nothing. She then explains that she loves him “according to my bond,” meaning she loves him as his child. She loves him as one who owes her very life to him. Lear cannot see true love presented to him in its simplest terms. On the other hand, he sees substance in the flowery but empty words of his two older daughters. Where there is truly love, Lear sees none at all. Where there is no love, he grabs its illusion as if it were real. Lear chooses blindness.

In seeing nothing and asking for nothing Lear gets what he asks for. He rejects and disowns Cordelia while embracing the lies of Goneril and Regan. The play descends into a world where the facade of empty flattery gives way to the reality of two daughters without love. Blinded by his pride and tenaciously grasping the oppressive weight of a self-centered world, he sinks into a hell where love hides and its absence prevails. The love Lear thought he saw is not there, and nothing sits in its place. Ultimately, he slips into madness, the natural state of a man who can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal. In banishing Cordelia, he banishes love and all that is real. He enters the dark void of a soul seeking nothing and seeing nothing. Only when he truly sees himself does he see Cordelia’s love and rise from the void. As the play approaches its final act he submits himself to her punishment, seeing both his “cause” for offense and her right to punish him, even offering his very life: “If you have poison for me, I will drink it.” She finds no fault and replies, “No cause, no cause.” She simply forgives. Her love is divine. It neither demands nor expects payment.

On such a note the play could have ended. However, the play goes one more act.
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