“Unnatural, detested, brutish villain” Assess the view that the villains in ‘King Lear’ are just evil
characters that cause the suffering of others as they seek to fulfil their own personal ambition
On the surface, the villains in ‘King Lear’ - Edmund, Regan, Goneril and Cornwall - are all seemingly evil,
Machiavellian type characters that don’t care about the suffering they cause in their journey to reach
power. However, all of them are more complex than the first appear and depending on the audiences’
interpretation of them, they could be interpreted to be the scapegoats of the play or even victims
themselves.
Edmund is one of the most unscrupulous of Shakespeare’s villains in ‘King Lear’. He manipulates, deceives
and exploits his family’s ‘foolish honesty’ because he believes that he ‘must have [Edgar’s] land’. His
personal ambition, which at the beginning of the play seems just to be to inherit his fathers land develops
into wishing to replace his father as Earl of Gloucester and later develops into ambition to become king,
believing that ‘the younger rises when the old doth fall’. He cares little about the suffering he causes to: his
brother, who is cast out by his father; his father, who is heartbroken by ‘Edgar’s’ betrayal and is later sold
out to Cornwall and faces torture because of this betrayal; Goneril and Regan, who he plays with their
attentions, causing them to be jealous of one another and later turn against each other; Cordelia, who he
orders the death of; or Lear, who is heartbroken by the loss of Cordelia and dies of this heartbreak. As
Edmund is given many soliloquies in the play, his motive is made clear to the audience, which see that he is
driven purely by personal ambition to ‘if not by birth, have lands by wit’, making him seem a purely evil
character who is also very self-aware. However, a more modern audience, which will tend to have more
liberal view on sex and families, may be able to sympathise with Edmund more as he is an illegitimate son,
who is ostracised from of society through no fault of his own which is what causes his jealously. The
audience can see the bitterness that this causes Edmund in his first soliloquy in which the world ‘base’ is
repeated several times, further emphasised by the harsh plosive sound on delivery, which may get the
audience on side so they too ask ‘why brand they us with base?’. Edmund’s character’s status as a villain is
further made complex through Shakespeare’s decision to grant him a deathbed repentance where he
decides ‘some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature’, and informs the characters on stage that he
has sent the Captain to go to kill Cordelia. This could be interpreted as a noble act which allows the
audience to feel more sympathetic towards him as it seems that he has had an anagnorisis and understands
all he has done wrong, or, it could be seen as a final, desperate and selfish act to save him from damnation
by the God’s whom he suddenly starts to recognise at the end of the play. As a villain, Edmund is certainly
driven by personal ambition and causes much suffering to the other characters, however, it may not be
possible label him are pure evil as he does warrant some sympathy from the audience at certain points in
the play.
Lear’s oldest daughter Goneril is another of Shakespeare’ villains who is described as a ‘fiend’ by Albany.
During the love contest, through personal ambition to inherit part of Lear’s kingdom, she tells Lear that she
‘loves [him] more than words can wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space and liberty’, something
which it quickly becomes clear was not true as she soon turns against him, casting him out into the storm
which leads to his descent into madness. As the play progresses, she seems to becomes more villainous as
she commits adultery and eventually becomes so consumed with jealousy over Edmund that she poisons
her sister and commits suicide – which would have been seen by many contemporise as a grave sin.
However, as many feminist critics have pointed out, she is treated terribly by Lear and his knights in act one
as ‘epicurism and lust make [her home] more like a tavern or a brothel than a graced palace’ and his
‘disordered rabble make servants of their betters’. Furthermore, at first, Goneril simply suggests to Lear
that he gets followers that are more suited to his age, and fewer of them. At this point, dependent on the
director’s choice on how the knights act in this scene, it is likely that the audience will sympathise with her.
Goneril’s suffering increases as she becomes a victim of Lear’s temper and irrationality as he curses her to
