#goneril

2. thees and thous

this still isn’t my strong suit, but crash source based on the cursory internet research i just did: “you” is for social superiors and people you respect; it’s an at-a-distance word. “thou” is for social inferiors, but it’s also for people you care about and are speaking to intimately, but it’s also an insult if you say it like an insult. apparently it was common for upper-class families to all “you” each other? i don’t know. what i know is everybody is “you”-ing lear in this first scene and that makes sense. he’s the king; he gets royal we privileges; nobody is above him in social status; everybody has to respect him (even/especially his own kids, because he’s The King and The Dad, roles which for lear are always synonymous in a way that gets people killed). right, good, okay. and lear calls his daughters “you,” just like gloucester calls edmund “you,” which also seems fair; this is a court setting, it’s highly formal, it—

that is an INSTANT switch. holy shit, that is an instant switch. so! turns out you can win “thou (intimate)” privileges and all you have to do is tell daddy you love him soooooooooo much in front of the entire gathered royal court, the king of france, and god. which, coincidentally, is also how you earn enormous amounts of material wealth in the form of massive land grants! i bet this total overlap of the family structure and the political structure can never go wrong for anyone.

“wait, so does he not thou cordelia?” oh, no, of course he thous cordelia.

you can’t scream at and disown your daughter without thouing her; let’s not be silly. (cordelia we need youth liberation NOW look at your dad dawg you’re going to prison)

(pronouns footnote: lear uses the royal we almost all the time, except when he’s really mad and talking to burgundy and starts slipping into “i.” the king of france uses “i” until he officially takes cordelia’s hand in marriage, and the switch to “we” there happens in a sentence: “Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance, / Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.” which feels, uh, pointed. hey, lear, remember, you’re not the only king on stage, actually! and then lear thous him instantly lmao. extremely messy senior citizen)

3. telling daddy you love him soooooooooo much

okay so first of all the very first lines of the play establish that the map has already been divided. we already know exactly who is getting what and how much, because gloucester tells us that albany and cornwall have gotten land inheritances so close in size that it’s impossible to tell who lear favors. which means this is court-wide information. so the entire love contest is a farce. i know we know this, but yikes! okay, moving on.

the general take on this scene is that goneril and regan are lying to butter their dad up, or at least laying it on really thick. i think that’s a true take. judging by the later acts, it definitely doesn’t seem as if—[pause to acknowledge the complicated feelings people have about parents who suck, etc etc]—they like that guy. but walk with me for a second here and let us assume that, while these speeches are performances, they are at least semi-honest performances in terms of how the sisters talk about love:

what goneril is more or less saying is that her love takes precedence over money, health, freedom of movement and perception, etc etc. which doesn’t necessarily mean love deprives her of those things, but it does “make breath poor, and speech unable,” which is a line about, like, choking up because you love someone so much, but also does very much paint love as something that takes away a person’s power. the vision of love presented here is one that makes you weak: loving someone Thiiiiiiis Much traps you in a blind box, feeble and mute and vulnerable.

and then you have regan, and of course she has to get her dig in at goneril #middlechild, but the way she talks about love is sort of opposite, because goneril is talking about love as the active force: love makes her breath and speech weak, etc etc. but regan is the active force in this speech: love turns her into an enemy warrior against other joys. love is a battlefield, or a competition; she’s actively against other pleasant things.

i don’t have anything super smart to say here, but if we take these speeches as reflecting their real thoughts about how love works, i at least end up at “love = powerlessness” for goneril and “love = combat” for regan. which does feel like it prefigures what’s to come—goneril wanting edmund in a desperate and powerless way, because she already has a husband that doesn’t even like her, a desperation that culminates in the murder of her closest ally; and regan and cornwall acting as one unit against the world in the blinding scene (including in literal combat).

and then, of course, “As much as child e'er loved, or father found;” also jumps out to me, because—well. that’s the question! that’s an animating question of this play! how much do children really love their parents? what will fathers find when they plumb their children’s depths? it’s possible goneril actually does mean this one, you know? i love you as much as any child ever loved their father, because i can’t believe in any daughter loving her father more than she’s forced to.

and then, of course, we have the Problem Child:

and of course this is the big question mark of this scene, right, the structured opacity of king lear. why does hamlet pretend to go mad, why does iago hate othello, why the fuck does cordelia say that when it’s SOOOOO easy to lie to dementia patients. and i think—well, i think she’s autistic, but more relevantly i think you can read this in a proto-social-theorist way. she has correctly identified the way family structures create ties of obligation and debt, and also the double bind women face as wives and daughters. (AND she’s pointing out, in those last two lines, that remaining an unmarried woman attached to her dad 5ever would not be “normal” age-appropriate development and would seem pretty incestuous after a point.) but it also comes off pretty cold. instead of “i love you thiiiiiis much” it’s “well, actually, factually, i owe love to more than one person ever 🤓 👆”

but i think that in itself is very revealing about cordelia’s worldview, which is one where things… like, seem to make sense? where there’s an order to things? everyone in lear wants to believe that there’s a coherent structure to the world, where parents do THIS and children do THIS and X is owed to Y and reciprocity of care is real and desire is an orderly thing that goes where it’s supposed to (50% to husband, 50% to father, easy, dust your hands). everybody wants this to be true (well, not edmund). but cordelia seems to be the only person in this goddamn play who actually believes it.

4. do you ever suspect some people have kids exclusively so they know someone will be there to take care of them when they’re really old? i’m not having kids so idk what i’m supposed to do

don’t you think it’s kind of crazy that lear refers to the kind of so-called barbarious person who “makes his generation messes / to gorge his appetite” (ie, eats his own children) and then six lines later says that he loved cordelia “most, and thought to set my rest / on her kind nursery”? and then he tells the other two husbands to “digest” cordelia’s dowry amongst themselves? like, what was that we were just saying about using our children as nutrients? what was that we were saying about using our children as raw materials to nourish and care for ourselves? must have been the wind

5. kent definitely leaves the scene early so he can be double-cast as france or burgundy, right?

lmao

6. goneril and regan, they could never ever ever make me hate you

i love cordelia. i think she is rude in a fun and autistic way. she’s really rude, though. this is so bitchy.

“well may you prosper! ☺️” is nuts. then again, to be fair to cordelia, neither of them said a goddamn word in her defence. but to be fair to goneril and regan—well, first of all, your dad, who they both go on to agree has always been like this (“he hath ever but slenderly known himself;” his senility joins “the imperfections of long-engraffed condition”), yelling at your sister and disowning her and threatening violence is SCARY even when he’s not the king. but second of all, he IS the king. this isn’t just a sibling thing. as K’s great post points out, lear is defining this as treason; it is extremely political, maybe more so than familial. to stand up for cordelia would, for the two of them, be raising their hands to go, “hey, can i have some treason and disownment too?”

anyway, the first thing they do after this is regroup and decide they have each other’s backs and recognize that this transfer of power is probably going to go badly. there’s literally nothing objectionable here man they are not being evil i think some of you [scholars] just hate women

6. sight/vision/blindness language tracker

the first time you see figurative language about blindness, you’re like, “haha, just like gloucester.” the fiftieth time you’re like whoa there’s a lot of eyes in this play

goneril saying she loves lear more than eyesight (which, if she meant it, could speak to love swaying one’s judgment—not relevant for her now, but perhaps later!)

kent’s “see better, lear,” which of course lear is not going to do (and which i think he never does—i will think about this harder as i reread the rest of this play, but even when lear comes to see cordelia more clearly, he maintains that he did no harm to goneril and regan, maybe in part because to him the king can do no harm to disobedient subjects)

7. textual trivia

my professor donated to me (starving hyperfixation urchin) an edition of this play (ETA: it's the 2000 pelican edition) that prints both authoritative texts of lear, a quarto and the first folio. these have more dramatic differences than most shakespeare quarto/folio editions, or so i’ve read, so because i’m crazy i’m comparing them. my trivia is:

only the folio has “as we, unburdened, crawl towards death.” where would we be without her.

in the folio, lear calls cordelia his “last and least;” in the quarto, it’s “last, but not least in love”

in the quarto he gives kent one fewer day to scram lol

in the quarto, gloucester introduces the entrance of burgundy and france. in the folio, cordelia apparently gets this line? which certainly gives the line a new tenor, since she’s just been Brutally Screamed At and hadn’t spoken since

8. in sum