Beloved Blinded By Pride

Beloved Blinded By Pride Love is deaf. Love is pure. Love is blind. These are the phrases people usually hear when talking about whom they care for the most. That no matter what the situation love will come out stronger that the saddest situation. Well in the case of King Lear and Cordelia this is true in the fact that their filial love was truly affirmed after a monumental amount of reality in the form of family and attendant betrayal. Cordelia’s love was stronger than her father’s pride of a king in their relationship. In the beginning of King Lear the king divides his kingdom to his three daughters based on words of flattery hoping much from his youngest and favorite Cordelia. Shakespeare wanted Lear’s pride of a king to be affirmed by those that he loved most in his old age and to retire. Lear quotes, “Tell me my daughters/ Since now we will divest us both of rule, / Interest of territory, case of state, / Which of you shall we say doth love us most? / That we our largest bounty may extend/ Where nature doth with merit challenge.” (King Lear, 2) He wants them to tell him how much they love him with the reward of a massive dowry of land and right to rule it as they see fit. So he is saying he doesn’t want love for love, but under that hope of a reward. Shakespeare is challenging the daughters’ filial love against the love and pride of ruler ship. That is not true love for family.
The elder sisters’ give long lists of fake praise and promises of eternal and everlasting love, while Cordelia refuses the challenge for her love is undiluted by the greed that is evident in this challenge of merit. She saw the evil in her father’s challenge and did not want to convey her adoration of the person she respected most under such greedy terms. To profess love for worldly goods hurts her heart. So when she refused the question Lear flew off the wall aphorizing “ I loved her most […] as here I give/ Her father’s heart from her! […] Let prides, which she calls plainness, marry her.”(King Lear, 5) With this outburst he professes his sadness of not hearing what he wanted to here from his favorite child, but he does not let go of his pride and just cuts all resources that his daughter should really receive. Lear says many cruel declarations such as Cordelia is taken as wife to France even after being disowned by King Lear. Without any blessings or dowry his favorite daughter leaves him and Lear tries to become closer with his eldest two daughters, Goneril and Regan. In his visits with his promised daughters, Lear comes to realize that his challenge of merits in the beginning of the story has made him give everything he had, including his “love” to the wrong people.
Shakespeare has make Lear unwittingly doom himself to torment, betrayal, and desolation by only wanting to hear worlds of love, not listening to his heart where he knew the true answer. The answer that only Cordelia truly, purely, innocently loved him enough to leave him even when she loved him so much. Then later she cares her foolish father back, for her foolishness is equal to her father’s in the sense that she would do whatever it takes to express her true filial love to her dense father. Lear can only be described as by the Fool, as nothing. A fool is a silly, but Lear is stupider that the fool, so says the Fool in the sense that that even he, the Fool, can see the King’s great mistaking in giving his eldest daughters everything and Cordelia nothing. In the end the Fool is right and the King was thrown around by the people closest to him such as his daughters, his men, his court as well as the weather itself. Cordelia dies in Lear’s arms and in tragedy his falls in despair and dies right after realizing how much of a shmuck he truly was. True love of those most beloved should not be judged as Lear did to Cordelia.
Work Cited Page
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Dover Publication Inc. 1994. Print

Cited: Page Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Dover Publication Inc. 1994. Print