Causes Of Mental Illness In King Lear

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“‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care,/ Propinquity and property of blood,/ And as a stranger to my heart and me/ Hold thee from this for ever”’ (Shakespeare 1.1.114-17). King Lear exclaims this as his youngest daughter Cordelia refuses to tell him how much she loves him. Lear does not think it is good enough to see the love, but his mind needs to hear it too. Throughout the play the reader can see King Lear descend into madness. In the tragic play King Lear by William Shakespeare, King Lear’s mental illness affects his daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia; along with others in the Kingdom of Leicester such as the Fool, Earl of Gloucester, and Earl of Kent. Although, Lear may not have been the cause of his mental illness, his family may be using the excuse to get …show more content…

They thought is was contagious, everyone will get it in their lives. Anything that looked odd and off the charts was then diagnosed with a mental illness. Munson addresses, “Whether Lear’s decision to divide his kingdom stems from what could be called ‘Disability in his natural Body’ depends largely on the concept of disability. At the time, the term disability did not carry any specific connotation of physical injury or mental deficiency, but meant simply ‘inability, incapacity, or impotence’ (OED, 1a)” (Munson 19). Anything out of the ordinary was diagnosed as a mental illness. King George was diagnosed with with a mental imbalance in October of 1788; in 1966 Dr. Ida Macalpine made a diagnosis of mental illness and in the end the diagnosis was acute intermittent porphyria which was a metabolic disorder in genetics (Ambrose 59). With the information we have in this day and age, doctors are able to diagnose patients much easier. It would be fairly easy to diagnose King Lear with a mental illness as the facts all point towards it. With monarchs being diagnosed with mental illnesses, the destruction of the monarchy

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