Fairy Tales and Honesty in Shakespeare's King Lear

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Fairy Tales and Honesty in King Lear

Shakespeare's King Lear, though it was written four centuries ago and is set in the far-distant mythological past, still carries a moralistic message with it today. Like traditional fairy tales, the authors of which Shakespeare owed a great deal to in creating the plot of this play, the entire play is set up to illustrate a single flaw in the human condition and teach a lesson about it. This lesson is the importance of honesty. Shakespeare hints at this throughout the play, but the lesson is finally stated explicitly in the last speech of the play, given by Edgar: "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" (5.3.393). This kind of explicitly moralistic ending is uncommon in Shakespeare's work, as we see by looking at the endings of some of his other plays. So why, then, in King Lear?

The relationships between characters that we observe in the play are informed in large part by the events of the play's first two scenes. In the first scene, Cordelia is banished after she is not willing to flatter Lear as her sisters were, an...

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