The Disruption Of Cosmological Order In King Lear

The Renaissance period William Shakespeare lived in differs greatly from the highly developed society we are living in and the way the Elizabethans looked at the universe has already been totally overthrown by the emergence of new science. However, without sufficient understanding of traditional cosmology, it is not an easy job for readers to fully understand the content, the structure and the theme of Shakespeare’s works. So the explanation of the tragedy of King Lear needs to be placed in the context of traditional cosmology to explore the cosmological order in this play. The world picture which the Elizabethan age inherited was that of an ordered universe arranged in a fixed system of hierarchies where everything has its appointed place. Hierarchy and order were advocated in everything, while a disruption of hierarchy or violation of order ends in universal chaos.Firstly, the broken system of Man is dealt with. Man is composed of body and soul which are meant to work in harmony. An excess of yellow bile in Lear’s body makes him a choleric person with characteristics such as excessive anger, acknowledged wayward and hideous rashness which are shown particularly in the opening. Lear breaks out frenzied anger at Cordelia’s honest answers and banishes loyal Kent rashly which lead himself into madness at last. The humoral imbalance responsible for his madness can also be viewed as a subversion of sovereignty in the mind. Reason’s ruling faculty in Lear’s mind is deprived by the passion so that Lear becomes mad.Secondly, the disrupted relationships in the families are focused on. According to the concept of Great Chain of Being, Man was placed between angels and beasts. Driven by desires, man has the possibility of descending into animals. The reversed order in the families is illustrated by the fact that the children like Edmund, Regan and Gonerill, are dominating the fathers. Their pursuit of monstrous desires for land and power make them degenerate from the kingdom of human to the kingdom of beasts. A lot of animal imagery is employed in King Lear to describe the brutality and bestiality of them. The broken down order in the families is also shown by the lustful relations between female and male and murders between family members.Lastly, the civil discords in the kingdom as well as the correspondences between the individual, the kingdom and the universe are illustrated. Among the concepts of cosmic order, nothing is more striking than the correspondences between macrocosm, body politic, and microcosm. A king is in the center of his realm, just as the sun, is set in the middle of the heavens, and as man’s heart is placed in the middle of his body. However, king is not a despot, who can independently do whatever he wants. By dividing his kingdom and abdicating his kingly power, and refusing to take advice from loyal subjects, King Lear makes mistakes which cause the court falls into the strife for status, for property, and lastly civil war happens. The disorder events on Earth are a version of the greater strife, Political turmoil in Lear kingdom is analogy to the disorder in the heavens and the tempest in Lear correspondence to disturbance in the universe.In a word, Shakespeare depicted a disordered picture from three perspectives: the broken system of the Man, the disrupted relationships in the families and the lost Lear kingdom. And the individual, the family, the kingdom and the universe share the same pattern and are linked together by the use of analogies in the play so that when one falls, they all fall.