Free English Literature Dissertations - In This Regard, Despite The Spread Of Christian Dogmas In Early Modern
In this regard, despite the spread of Christian dogmas in early modern England, Renaissance literature demonstrates social doubts and the denial of the principal dogmas of the Church. Shakespeare’s King Lear reflects these doubts, reducing Christianity to a simple suppressive institution that like other controlling agencies generates the subversion it calls sin to enable the containment it calls grace4. In the eighteenth-twentieth centuries, the denial of death was intensified by various philosophical schools and literature that signified social and cultural changes of the western world5. As Phillipe Aries points out, this denial of death is a direct result of modernity that emerged in the eighteenth century and continued up until the twentieth century6.
The treatment of death in the early modern thinking
The attitude of the early modern thinkers towards death considerably corresponds with the ideas of death presented by William Shakespeare in King Lear; the play not only interacts, but also develops out of the Renaissance philosophy of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne and Jacques Choron, revealing the influence of these thinkers on the dramatist’s treatment of certain issues. For Michel de Montaigne, suicide is a rightful choice of a person and it is one of the fairest ways to end one’s own existence; although, in Shakespeare’s King Lear Cordelia is killed, her death is described in heroic terms and is regarded as the rescue from all occurred conflicts and troubles. On the other hand, Cordelia’s death is demonstrated as the consequence of Lear’s desire to be loved by his daughters, and it is this particular desire that makes him take a wrong decision that finally results in the death of his devoted daughter. As Jonathan Dollimore puts it, For the Jacobeans, as for us, what connects death with desire is mutability the sense that all being is governed by a ceaseless process of change inseparable from an inconsolable sense of loss7. Montaigne supports the idea of changes throughout his Essays, claiming that only a fool is bound by fear of death8; thus, the philosopher expresses the desire for death, while King Lear is afraid of death, and this unconscious fear results in his madness. However, Cordelia’s death makes Lear finally realise death, as he claims at the end of the play:
Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone
For ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives9.
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