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The character of King Lear is perhaps the most famous “madman” in all of literature. But what does Shakespeare’s famous tragedy tell us about madness itself? What is madness?
At the beginning of the play, King Lear has grown tired of the responsibility that goes with kingly authority and decides to retire. Showing his vanity, he commands his three daughters to tell him how much they love him. The one who pleases him most in their flattery of him will get most of the power that he is giving away. Two of his daughters attempt to outdo each other in heaping praise upon their father, each intent in pleasing him in order to get the prize of worldly power.
The third daughter, Cordelia, the one who truly loves him, refuses to flatter him. She will not play her father’s foolish game. She tells him that she loves him as she should, as a loyal and loving daughter, but that she cannot give him all her love unreservedly because, when she marries, she will need to love as a wife and a mother, not merely as a daughter.
The folly of flattery
King Lear is outraged at his daughter’s refusal to flatter him and banishes her from his kingdom. The other two daughters inherit the kingdom and then show nothing but contempt for their now powerless father. Realizing his folly in seeking flattery and trusting flatterers, Lear begins to see that his vanity had been insanity.
As an outcast, on a cold heath in a storm, King Lear meets a mendicant, a beggar, who is singing an old Franciscan ballad. Like St. Francis, the beggar says that he has turned his back on his former wicked life and has embraced holy poverty. He alludes to the 10 commandments, warns against the deadly sins, and proclaims that nothing but virtue can “defy the foul fiend,” the devil. He then returns to the singing of the Franciscan ballad.
Imitating St. Francis
Taking his cue from the near naked beggar (and St. Francis), King Lear, in a moment of “madness,” strips himself naked as St. Francis is said to have done at his own moment of radical conversion.
“Off, off, you lendings!” he exclaims.
Ironically and paradoxically, this moment of madness is the moment when Lear comes to his senses. Powerless in the face of elemental nature and stripped of his political power by unscrupulous treachery, he realizes that the very clothes on his back are but “lendings.” They are lent as life itself is lent. He doesn’t own his life. He owes it. He sees what we need to see. Our own life is also lent. We don’t own it. We owe it. Our lives are owed to the Giver of Life.
We can take nothing with us when we shuffle off this mortal coil. We will leave as naked as the day on which we arrived. In stripping off his worldly “lendings” as St. Francis had done before him, King Lear is simply acknowledging reality in its ultimate simplicity. He discovers the truth and recovers his senses.
Behold the man
Such wisdom is merely foolishness in the eyes of the world, which is why worldly readers of King Lear believe that Lear goes mad on the heath, not that he experiences a religious conversion as radical as that of St. Francis.
King Lear strips himself of his garments. St. Francis strips himself of his garments. Jesus Christ is stripped of his garments. It is in beholding the Man, and the beholding of men like Him, that we come to see that sinfulness is madness and that only sanctity is sanity.
