| 英国文学 |
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King Lear<-Shakespeare<-chapter 3<-contents<-position |
 
 
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Cordelia’s chief
characteristics are devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty—honesty to a
fault, perhaps. She is contrasted throughout the play with Goneril and
Regan, who are neither honest nor loving, and who manipulate their father
for their own ends. By refusing to take part in Lear’s love test at the
beginning of the play, Cordelia establishes herself as a repository of
virtue, and the obvious authenticity of her love for Lear makes clear the
extent of the king’s error in banishing her. For most of the middle section
of the play, she is offstage, but as we observe the depredations of Goneril
and Regan and watch Lear’s descent into madness, Cordelia is never far from
the audience’s thoughts, and her beauty is venerably described in religious
terms. Indeed, rumors of her return to Britain begin to surface almost
immediately, and once she lands at Dover, the action of the play begins to
move toward her, as all the characters converge on the coast. Cordelia’s
reunion with Lear marks the apparent restoration of order in the kingdom and
the triumph of love and forgiveness over hatred and spite. This fleeting
moment of familial happiness makes the devastating finale of King Lear that
much more cruel, as Cordelia, the personification of kindness and virtue,
becomes a literal sacrifice to the heartlessness of an apparently unjust
world Of all of the play’s villains, Edmund is the most complex and
sympathetic. He is a consummate schemer, a Machiavellian character eager to
seize any opportunity and willing to do anything to achieve his goals.
However, his ambition is interesting insofar as it reflects not only a
thirst for land and power but also a desire for the recognition denied to
him by his status as a bastard. His serial treachery is not merely
self-interested; it is a conscious rebellion against the social order that
has denied him the same status as Gloucester’s legitimate son, Edgar. “Now,
gods, stand up for bastards,” (Act I, Scene ii, L22) Edmund commands, but in
fact he depends not on divine aid but on his own initiative. He is the
ultimate self-made man, and he is such a cold and capable villain that it is
entertaining to watch him work, much as the audience can appreciate the
clever wickedness of Iago in Othello. Only at the close of the play does
Edmund show a flicker of weakness. Mortally wounded, he sees that both
Goneril and Regan have died for him, and whispers, “Yet Edmund was beloved”
(Act V, Scene iii, L238). After this ambiguous statement, he seems to repent
of his villainy and admits to having ordered Cordelia’s death. His peculiar
change of heart, rare among Shakespearean villains, is enough to make the
audience wonder, amid the carnage, whether Edmund’s villainy sprang not from
some innate cruelty but simply from a thwarted, misdirected desire for the
familial love that he witnessed around him.
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