Explore Shakespeare's presentation of honesty in King Lear.

The disintegration of honesty begins with Lear’s abdication. In challenging his daughters to proclaim their limitless love for him, Shakespeare foregrounds honesty, immediately placing it in sharp contention with deceit as Goneril and Regan offer explicitly “insincere courtly hyperbole (Sean McEvoy) in response to Lear’s “unburdened crawl towards death.” Ironically claiming to love her father “dearer than eyesight, space and liberty”, Goneril exploits “Lear’s fundamental error of leadership.” (Rob Worrall) Superficially commuting the powerful feudal system into the love system Lear desires, Goneril utilises hyperbole to oleaginously affirm Lear’s egotistical belief that he can be the superlative father, monarch and demigod. In echoing King James’ assertion that ‘kings are justly called Gods’, Shakespeare conjures a palpable tension as he subtly warns the King against such hubris exhibited by Lear, as it leaves him blind to deception. Reducing love to a mere commodity through the imagery generated by the rule of three list, Goneril decapitates honesty, and though perhaps her legalistic pitch was successful in pleasing her father, it fails to conceal her duality from the audience. In fact, in the 2016 Gregory Doran production, Goneril’s initial rhetoric is spoken with her facing the audience, rather than her own father, alluding to her dual nature. Asking Cordelia - the favoured daughter likely to win herself the “more opulent” third of the kingdom - to profess her love, Lear is astounded by her blunt confession that she “cannot heave my heart into my mouth” for him. Cordelia, often judged as the model of human virtuosity, reveals to the audience her sacrifice - enduring shame in pursuit of honesty. This idea of nothingness and negation she initiates is philosophically central to the play from start to finish, and here commences the disintegration of honesty. Banished for speaking truth, honesty is inverted; the deceit of Goneril and Regan prevails.

Honesty tries its best to muscle its way back into the fibres of civilisation, but dramatically fails, not least because it is Kent who is the vehicle of this feat. It is Kent who ‘heroically’ implores Lear to “see better” after his “hideous rashness” of banishing Cordelia - who Kent believes “justly thinks and has most rightly said.” In banishing Kent, Lear perpetuates the inversion of justice, abandoning the Jacobean Charter of Liberties that stated a monarch must regard all below him with respect. However, “Kent exists only to serve the King he loves” (Martha Rozett). A “clumsy novice”(Hugh Maclean) in the art of disguise, Kent, now Caius, becomes dependent on the passage of time to ensure his just reward for his honesty. Anticipating the ultimate reconciliation with Lear in exposing his true identity, Kent is refused the justice he supposedly deserves as Lear admits that “This is a dull sight. Are you not Kent?” Denied the sentimental reunion he had been expecting, the blunt minor sentences reveal to the audience that Kent’s stoic honesty “does not spare him from suffering” (Martha Rozett). Concealed behind his heroic facade as Caius, Kent’s true ineffectuality is verbalised in Lear’s lexical nuance that equates his servant with a bleak dullness. It seems Lear finds Kent’s unwavering honesty mutinous and unhelpful, something too static and simple in a society where Cordelia’s death vindicates “the naturally just moral order”(Paul Shupack). Honesty for Kent, as for Cordelia, is entirely futile.

However, for the Fool, it seems that honesty takes a different dimension. Not the stripped-back concept of raw emotion it is for Kent and Cordelia, honesty for the Fool is what defines him, what makes him the “chorus of the play” (William Tamblyn). Yet, the Fool’s version of honesty is not one-dimensional, it is multifaceted, and no better is this exemplified than in his perplexing riddles. Admonishing Lear’s old age, the Fool warns his King that “thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” The Fool speaks the truth that is central to the play’s tragic form. Old age does not coincide with wisdom. The Fool’s direct address of his king as ‘thou’ would have struck contemporaries as both extraordinary and foolhardy. In Jacobean England ‘thou’ and ‘you’ were used with precision and purpose: superiors were addressed as ‘you’, inferiors as ‘thou’, and it seems in the Fool’s bolshy attempt to avert Lear’s gaze from power into his own internal abyss, he tries to imbibe Lear with the honesty that, allegedly, should have characterised any monarch. Determinedly pursuing this ambition to drive a sense of self-actualisation into Lear, the Fool’s prophetic assertion he “had rather be any kind of thing than a fool, and yet” he would not be “thee, nuncle”, a confession that only foregrounds honesty. The comedic epithet the Fool adopts in reference to Lear carries more sinister undertones below the facade of lightheartedness; the sinister undertones of truth. Here, the Fool finally does his “duty as activator of Lear's conscience”, as Lear solipsistically admits that he has “ta’e too little care of this.” upon seeing the “poor wretches” in the storm. (Betty Stuart) The speaker of harsh truths through riddles has finally fulfilled his purpose, dropping out of the play in the third act.  Truth, as the Fool has led his king to it, leaves Lear open to the slow-working, silent kind of truths that Kent and Cordelia represent. The Fool has caused Lear to heed inexpressible truths and the people who embody them. When we see Lear without his Fool, we notice that he has incorporated in his own speech the mannerisms of his boy, telling Gloucester prophetically that “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”. Lear now speaks in paradoxes because he has learned that paradox is the only way to represent truths.