I am a man more sinned against than sinning.
~ King Lear
But screw your courage to the sticking-place And well not fail.
~ Lady Macbeth
Prologue
This is part II of my essay on William Shakespeare (1564 1616) the great English playwright poet and actor celebrated as the most outstanding writer in the English language and the worlds greatest dramatist. In this treatment I will compare and contrast two of my favorite classics of Shakespeare: King Learand Macbeth and place these literary narratives in modern times with the recently defeated U.S. president Barack Obama a president who behaves not as the chief executive constrained under a constitutional Republic but as a tyrannical emperor or a lawless king oblivious to reality.
King Lear
King Lear the aging monarch of Britain renounces his throne and divides his empire to his three daughters in equal shares. First King Lear gives his daughters an ordeal (test) probing each to express how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan Lears older daughters offer their father gratuitous responses which please him. However Cordelia Lears youngest and favored daughter stands mute declaring that it impossible to state proper words to define her devotion to her father. Lear becomes enraged and renounces Cordelia as his daughter and heir. However the king of France is in love with Cordelia and affirms his love despite her having no kingdom (dowry) and she goes with him to France deprived of her fathers blessing.
Lear soon discovers that he made a horrible judgment. The treacherous duplicity of Goneril and Regan is manifested as they quickly conspire to undermine the residual power that Lear still maintains. Delusional to the fact that his beloved daughters are betraying him Lear loses touch with reality and gradually goes crazy. He escapes his daughters houses and aimlessly roams in the countryside finding a place to rest upon a heath during a torrential rainstorm attended by his Fool and by Kent a loyal nobleman in disguise.
During this time Gloucester an ageing nobleman similarly is plagued with family drama. Edmund his son outside of marriage deceives him into thinking that Edgar his legitimate son has conspired to kill him. Escaping the posse his father sent to arrest him Edgar cloaks himself in beggars clothes referring to himself as Poor Tom." Resembling Lear he joins the king who is still on the heath and becomes his ally against his daughters however he is cruelly punished by Reagan and Cornwall who blind him for his treachery and leave him to roam the countryside.
Daughter Cordelia leading a French army invades Dover as part of an attack force to rescue her father. Gonerils husband Albany gradually becomes receptive to Lears cause yet the plot thickens as Edmund eventually falls in love with both Regan and Goneril. Goneril and her lover Edmund conspire to murder Albany but fail. The depressed Gloucester attempts to kill himself but Edgar protects him through trickery. In the meantime the English army arrive at Dover and led by Edmund in a decisive battle overthrow the Cordelia-led forces of the French army. Lear and Cordelia are apprehended. In the concluding scene Edgar fights with and kills Edmund; we find out that Gloucester has been killed; Goneril poisons Regan out of suspicion over Edmund and then takes her own life when her betrayal is exposed to Albany; Edmunds treachery against Cordelia leads to her unnecessary death while in prison; and Lear finally perishes from a broken heart at hearing of the death of his favorite daughter Cordelia. Albany Edgar and the elderly Kent remain and form an alliance to become caretakers of England under a veil of despair and profound sorrow.
King Lear on the Psychiatrist Couch
Shakespeare scholar Copplia Kahn offers a psychoanalytic understanding of the maternal subtext contained in King Lear to explain the conspicuous absence of actual mothers in the play. Kahn theorizes that Lear in his old age degenerates into an infantile nature and now looks for a devotion that is usually fulfilled by a nurturing mother. Her clinical view of Lear is that of a child being mothered but without genuine mothers his children become surrogate mothers or the daughter-mother figures particularly Lears favorite daughter Cordelia.
Sigmund Freud believed that Cordelia represents Death. Thus at the start of the play we find Lear in a rage spurning his daughter it should be understood as the king repudiating death. Lear is also reluctant to confront the limitations of the human condition. The plays emotional concluding scene in which Lear brings the body of his favorite Cordelia was of profound meaning to Freud. In this scene she causes in Lear a realization of his human mortality or as Freud put it she causes him to make friends with the necessity of dying." It is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare had special motives with Cordelias death for no other setting of King Lear included having Cordelia killed. Goneril and Regans Oedipal motives are duplicitous against their father and like Sophocles classic play from antiquity Oedipus Rex such duplicity and diabolical acts lead to the tragic deaths of all parties involved.
Macbeth
The play starts with the momentary appearance of three witches and then shifts to a military camp when the Scottish King Duncan learns the news that his generals Macbeth and Banquo have conquered two different armed forcesone from Ireland commanded by the dissident Macdonwald and one from Norway. After their protracted battle with these rival powers Macbeth and Banquo come upon three witches. The witches vision that Macbeth will be made thane (a position of Scottish aristocracy) of Cawdor and ultimately King of Scotland. Additionally the witches prophesy that Macbeths friend Banquo will produce a line of Scottish kings yet ironically Banquo will fail to achieve this rank himself. The witches disappear and Macbeth and Banquo are skeptical of the Witches predictions until some of King Duncans men congratulate them for heroic valor in battle and name him thane of Cawdor. Macbeth is fascinated by the chance that the rest of the witches predictionthat he will be crowned kingmay indeed be truth however he is fearful about what to anticipate. He calls upon King Duncan and they have dinner at Macbeths castle at Inverness that evening. Macbeth in a letter to his wife Lady Macbeth informs her of every detail.
Lady Macbeth on many levels is the opposite of her husband and replaces Macbeths existential doubt and indecision with her Machiavellian call-to-action. Lady Macbeth lusts for the crown for herself but is content to rule as proxy behind the scenes instructing Macbeth to murder Duncan so as to attain the crown. When Macbeth comes to Inverness she controls all of her husbands actions and compels him to assassinate the king that very night. The conspiracy is that he and Lady Macbeth plot to get Duncans two chamberlains drunk so they will black out; the next morning they will place the guilt of murder on the chamberlains who will fail to mount a viable defense for they will not remember anything. Macbeth stabs Duncan lays he asleep in bed plagued by doubts he is cursed by visions including many ghostly warnings and an apparition of a bloody knife. When Duncans death is discovered Macbeth immediately kills the chamberlains the following morningallegedly out of anger regarding their criminal actsand shamelessly accepts the crown. Dreading that their fathers murderer will now seek to kill his heirs Duncans sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland as well.
Macbeth employs a gang of assassins to kill Banquo and his son Fleance because he is concerned about the witches prophecy that Banquos heirs will seize the throne. They trap Banquo and kill him but Fleance escapes making Macbeth very angry for as long as Fleance is alive he worries that his authority remains uncertain. That night at the banquet Banquos ghost haunts Macbeth causing an embarrassing scene among the important guests including many Scottish nobility. Lady Macbeth attempts to counteract the fiasco but Macbeths rule provokes increasing opposition from his aristocrats and subjects. Terrified Macbeth calls on the witches in their cave. The witches display to him a sequence of demons spirits and future ominous predictions: he is told that Macduff a Scottish aristocrat who opposed Macbeths rise to the throne is his enemy; he is invincible to being injured by any woman or by any man born of woman; and he will be safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Castle. Macbeth is comforted and thinks he is safe since he deduces that every human being is born by some woman and thus he is like a god...invincible. Discovering that Macduff has escaped to England to join Malcolm Macbeth commands that Macduffs castle be seized and most brutally that Lady Macduff and her children be killed.
While in England Macduff learns of his familys death is filled with anguish and swears revenge. Prince Malcolm Duncans son gathers an army in England and Macduff allies with him as he moves to Scotland to encounter Macbeths forces. The war has the backing of the Scottish aristocrats who are shocked and horrified by Macbeths dictatorial and murderous acts. Lady Macbeth is like her husband also tormented with hysterics of sleepwalking causing her to despair what she imagines to be bloodstains on her handsOut damned spot! Out I say!Before Macduff confronts Macbeth he discovers that Lady Macbeth committed suicide which sends him into an almost catatonic state of despair. Notwithstanding he anticipates the English and reinforces Dunsinane as his last line of defense; arrogant in the assurance that the witches predictions will assure his invincibility. However at this point Macbeth is overcome with fear when he discovers that the English forces are invading Dunsinane protected with branches cut from Birnam Wood thus half of the witches prophecy has become fulfilled since Birnam Wood is truly coming to Dunsinane.
As the battle rages Macbeth slashes wildly yet the English armies slowly overpower his army and seize his beloved castle. As a final end to Macbeths tyrannical rule while in battle his avowed enemy Macduff proclaims that Macbeth was not of woman born" but was instead untimely ripped" from his mothers womb. Macbeth though he is transfixed by his realization that he is doomed as the final half of the witches prophecy is fulfilled yet he carries on the battle until Macduff kills him and cuts off his head. Malcolm now the King of Scotland pronounces his generous intentions upon England and invites everyone to witness his coronation at Scone.
Epilogue to King Lear Macbeth and Obama
Immediately almost on cue after Republicans took the largest majority in both houses of Congress since 1929 when Hoover was president Obama strutted out in front of his handpicked Democrat Socialist Party media" for a press conference which was full of defiance arrogance and megalomania on a Shakespearean level. Yet few people realize Obama never makes a move without consulting his cabal of female advisors who conservative intellectual Michael Savage calls The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" Valerie Jarrett Michelle Obama Susan Rice and Samantha Power. These women are all hard-core socialist radicals and modern-day Lady Macbethsduplicitous self-willed bloody conniving women who are daily whispering in the ear of a weak tyrannical and psychotic Macbeth or like the treasonous daughters Goneril and Regan whispering in the ear of King Lear (Obama). These Harpies have for decades written his policy directives and crafted the poisonous words on his ubiquitous teleprompter. Words of lies deceit infamy and treachery that unconstitutionally holds Obama up as king or emperor of America therefore Obama foolishly thinks that he never needs to defer to Congress or to the Supreme Court; to share power with no one…for Obama is a law onto HIMSELF! It reminded me of the scene where Lady Macbeth challenges Macbeth to commit to the plan to murder King Duncan by uttering these diabolical words of treasonBut screw your courage to the sticking-place And well not fail.
Read the Macbeth/King Lear rantings of a psychotic U.S. President whose unconstitutional policies have hijacked a great nation for six years; polices that were in last weeks election overwhelmingly rejected by the voters to such a degree as to set the Democrat Socialist Party back nearly 100 years: I dont want to try and read the tea leaves on election resultsObama said the day after his historic losses in Congress. If you send me a amnesty for illegal aliens bill that I can sign executive e.g. fascist actions go away."
*N.B.: This essay is based in part on ideas from Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World Robert Maynard Hutchins Editor-in-Chief (University of Chicago 1952) Vol. 2 Chap. 35Honor; Vol. 3 Chap. 73Prudence; Vol. 27Shakespeare II.
I am a man more sinned against than sinning.
~ King Lear
But screw your courage to the sticking-place And well not fail.
~ Lady Macbeth
Prologue
This is part II of my essay on William Shakespeare (1564 1616) the great English playwright poet and actor celebrated as the most outstanding writer in the English language and the worlds greatest dramatist. In this treatment I will compare and contrast two of my favorite classics of Shakespeare: King Learand Macbeth and place these literary narratives in modern times with the recently defeated U.S. president Barack Obama a president who behaves not as the chief executive constrained under a constitutional Republic but as a tyrannical emperor or a lawless king oblivious to reality.
King Lear
King Lear the aging monarch of Britain renounces his throne and divides his empire to his three daughters in equal shares. First King Lear gives his daughters an ordeal (test) probing each to express how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan Lears older daughters offer their father gratuitous responses which please him. However Cordelia Lears youngest and favored daughter stands mute declaring that it impossible to state proper words to define her devotion to her father. Lear becomes enraged and renounces Cordelia as his daughter and heir. However the king of France is in love with Cordelia and affirms his love despite her having no kingdom (dowry) and she goes with him to France deprived of her fathers blessing.
Lear soon discovers that he made a horrible judgment. The treacherous duplicity of Goneril and Regan is manifested as they quickly conspire to undermine the residual power that Lear still maintains. Delusional to the fact that his beloved daughters are betraying him Lear loses touch with reality and gradually goes crazy. He escapes his daughters houses and aimlessly roams in the countryside finding a place to rest upon a heath during a torrential rainstorm attended by his Fool and by Kent a loyal nobleman in disguise.
During this time Gloucester an ageing nobleman similarly is plagued with family drama. Edmund his son outside of marriage deceives him into thinking that Edgar his legitimate son has conspired to kill him. Escaping the posse his father sent to arrest him Edgar cloaks himself in beggars clothes referring to himself as Poor Tom." Resembling Lear he joins the king who is still on the heath and becomes his ally against his daughters however he is cruelly punished by Reagan and Cornwall who blind him for his treachery and leave him to roam the countryside.
Daughter Cordelia leading a French army invades Dover as part of an attack force to rescue her father. Gonerils husband Albany gradually becomes receptive to Lears cause yet the plot thickens as Edmund eventually falls in love with both Regan and Goneril. Goneril and her lover Edmund conspire to murder Albany but fail. The depressed Gloucester attempts to kill himself but Edgar protects him through trickery. In the meantime the English army arrive at Dover and led by Edmund in a decisive battle overthrow the Cordelia-led forces of the French army. Lear and Cordelia are apprehended. In the concluding scene Edgar fights with and kills Edmund; we find out that Gloucester has been killed; Goneril poisons Regan out of suspicion over Edmund and then takes her own life when her betrayal is exposed to Albany; Edmunds treachery against Cordelia leads to her unnecessary death while in prison; and Lear finally perishes from a broken heart at hearing of the death of his favorite daughter Cordelia. Albany Edgar and the elderly Kent remain and form an alliance to become caretakers of England under a veil of despair and profound sorrow.
King Lear on the Psychiatrist Couch
Shakespeare scholar Copplia Kahn offers a psychoanalytic understanding of the maternal subtext contained in King Lear to explain the conspicuous absence of actual mothers in the play. Kahn theorizes that Lear in his old age degenerates into an infantile nature and now looks for a devotion that is usually fulfilled by a nurturing mother. Her clinical view of Lear is that of a child being mothered but without genuine mothers his children become surrogate mothers or the daughter-mother figures particularly Lears favorite daughter Cordelia.
Sigmund Freud believed that Cordelia represents Death. Thus at the start of the play we find Lear in a rage spurning his daughter it should be understood as the king repudiating death. Lear is also reluctant to confront the limitations of the human condition. The plays emotional concluding scene in which Lear brings the body of his favorite Cordelia was of profound meaning to Freud. In this scene she causes in Lear a realization of his human mortality or as Freud put it she causes him to make friends with the necessity of dying." It is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare had special motives with Cordelias death for no other setting of King Lear included having Cordelia killed. Goneril and Regans Oedipal motives are duplicitous against their father and like Sophocles classic play from antiquity Oedipus Rex such duplicity and diabolical acts lead to the tragic deaths of all parties involved.
Macbeth
The play starts with the momentary appearance of three witches and then shifts to a military camp when the Scottish King Duncan learns the news that his generals Macbeth and Banquo have conquered two different armed forcesone from Ireland commanded by the dissident Macdonwald and one from Norway. After their protracted battle with these rival powers Macbeth and Banquo come upon three witches. The witches vision that Macbeth will be made thane (a position of Scottish aristocracy) of Cawdor and ultimately King of Scotland. Additionally the witches prophesy that Macbeths friend Banquo will produce a line of Scottish kings yet ironically Banquo will fail to achieve this rank himself. The witches disappear and Macbeth and Banquo are skeptical of the Witches predictions until some of King Duncans men congratulate them for heroic valor in battle and name him thane of Cawdor. Macbeth is fascinated by the chance that the rest of the witches predictionthat he will be crowned kingmay indeed be truth however he is fearful about what to anticipate. He calls upon King Duncan and they have dinner at Macbeths castle at Inverness that evening. Macbeth in a letter to his wife Lady Macbeth informs her of every detail.
Lady Macbeth on many levels is the opposite of her husband and replaces Macbeths existential doubt and indecision with her Machiavellian call-to-action. Lady Macbeth lusts for the crown for herself but is content to rule as proxy behind the scenes instructing Macbeth to murder Duncan so as to attain the crown. When Macbeth comes to Inverness she controls all of her husbands actions and compels him to assassinate the king that very night. The conspiracy is that he and Lady Macbeth plot to get Duncans two chamberlains drunk so they will black out; the next morning they will place the guilt of murder on the chamberlains who will fail to mount a viable defense for they will not remember anything. Macbeth stabs Duncan lays he asleep in bed plagued by doubts he is cursed by visions including many ghostly warnings and an apparition of a bloody knife. When Duncans death is discovered Macbeth immediately kills the chamberlains the following morningallegedly out of anger regarding their criminal actsand shamelessly accepts the crown. Dreading that their fathers murderer will now seek to kill his heirs Duncans sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland as well.
Macbeth employs a gang of assassins to kill Banquo and his son Fleance because he is concerned about the witches prophecy that Banquos heirs will seize the throne. They trap Banquo and kill him but Fleance escapes making Macbeth very angry for as long as Fleance is alive he worries that his authority remains uncertain. That night at the banquet Banquos ghost haunts Macbeth causing an embarrassing scene among the important guests including many Scottish nobility. Lady Macbeth attempts to counteract the fiasco but Macbeths rule provokes increasing opposition from his aristocrats and subjects. Terrified Macbeth calls on the witches in their cave. The witches display to him a sequence of demons spirits and future ominous predictions: he is told that Macduff a Scottish aristocrat who opposed Macbeths rise to the throne is his enemy; he is invincible to being injured by any woman or by any man born of woman; and he will be safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Castle. Macbeth is comforted and thinks he is safe since he deduces that every human being is born by some woman and thus he is like a god...invincible. Discovering that Macduff has escaped to England to join Malcolm Macbeth commands that Macduffs castle be seized and most brutally that Lady Macduff and her children be killed.
While in England Macduff learns of his familys death is filled with anguish and swears revenge. Prince Malcolm Duncans son gathers an army in England and Macduff allies with him as he moves to Scotland to encounter Macbeths forces. The war has the backing of the Scottish aristocrats who are shocked and horrified by Macbeths dictatorial and murderous acts. Lady Macbeth is like her husband also tormented with hysterics of sleepwalking causing her to despair what she imagines to be bloodstains on her handsOut damned spot! Out I say!Before Macduff confronts Macbeth he discovers that Lady Macbeth committed suicide which sends him into an almost catatonic state of despair. Notwithstanding he anticipates the English and reinforces Dunsinane as his last line of defense; arrogant in the assurance that the witches predictions will assure his invincibility. However at this point Macbeth is overcome with fear when he discovers that the English forces are invading Dunsinane protected with branches cut from Birnam Wood thus half of the witches prophecy has become fulfilled since Birnam Wood is truly coming to Dunsinane.
As the battle rages Macbeth slashes wildly yet the English armies slowly overpower his army and seize his beloved castle. As a final end to Macbeths tyrannical rule while in battle his avowed enemy Macduff proclaims that Macbeth was not of woman born" but was instead untimely ripped" from his mothers womb. Macbeth though he is transfixed by his realization that he is doomed as the final half of the witches prophecy is fulfilled yet he carries on the battle until Macduff kills him and cuts off his head. Malcolm now the King of Scotland pronounces his generous intentions upon England and invites everyone to witness his coronation at Scone.
Epilogue to King Lear Macbeth and Obama
Immediately almost on cue after Republicans took the largest majority in both houses of Congress since 1929 when Hoover was president Obama strutted out in front of his handpicked Democrat Socialist Party media" for a press conference which was full of defiance arrogance and megalomania on a Shakespearean level. Yet few people realize Obama never makes a move without consulting his cabal of female advisors who conservative intellectual Michael Savage calls The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" Valerie Jarrett Michelle Obama Susan Rice and Samantha Power. These women are all hard-core socialist radicals and modern-day Lady Macbethsduplicitous self-willed bloody conniving women who are daily whispering in the ear of a weak tyrannical and psychotic Macbeth or like the treasonous daughters Goneril and Regan whispering in the ear of King Lear (Obama). These Harpies have for decades written his policy directives and crafted the poisonous words on his ubiquitous teleprompter. Words of lies deceit infamy and treachery that unconstitutionally holds Obama up as king or emperor of America therefore Obama foolishly thinks that he never needs to defer to Congress or to the Supreme Court; to share power with no one…for Obama is a law onto HIMSELF! It reminded me of the scene where Lady Macbeth challenges Macbeth to commit to the plan to murder King Duncan by uttering these diabolical words of treasonBut screw your courage to the sticking-place And well not fail.
Read the Macbeth/King Lear rantings of a psychotic U.S. President whose unconstitutional policies have hijacked a great nation for six years; polices that were in last weeks election overwhelmingly rejected by the voters to such a degree as to set the Democrat Socialist Party back nearly 100 years: I dont want to try and read the tea leaves on election resultsObama said the day after his historic losses in Congress. If you send me a amnesty for illegal aliens bill that I can sign executive e.g. fascist actions go away."
*N.B.: This essay is based in part on ideas from Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World Robert Maynard Hutchins Editor-in-Chief (University of Chicago 1952) Vol. 2 Chap. 35Honor; Vol. 3 Chap. 73Prudence; Vol. 27Shakespeare II.