Loyalty Theme – King Lear Essay Example

and expected to be obeyed.

Women were raised to believe that they were inferior to men. Men would have to guide the female members of their family and, in the case of wealthier people, arrange advantageous marriages for their sons and daughters. Women had no rights at all and all that they had would become their husband's property on marriage. What these people would have seen in the play was Gonerill and Regan, two women, plotting and going up against their father for power over the kingdom.

Their husbands, Cornwall and Albany, cannot control their wives and therefore the women go off on their own tangent, completely opposing everything Elizabethan’s were taught to believe and how to act. The audience would’ve also seen Lear splitting his crown in half as abominable and against the Divine Right of Kings and the reason for all the dire consequences he later finds himself in. The fool, who is often the voice of truth and wisdom in the play, declares as much when he compares Lear’s crown to an egg, saying: “When thou lovest thy crown I’th’middle and gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt. ”

In the sub-plot, disloyalty is also displayed in the form of Gloucester’s bastard son Edmund. Edmund frames his brother in order to become heir to his father’s fortune and proves treacherous. Elizabethans would’ve seen themselves as above Edmund because he is a bastard; excluding a small minority who they themselves would’ve been bastards. The majority would’ve seen Edmund as stepping over the line into territory he had no place or right to be

in, the rest perhaps sympathising with the character.