Familial Love. Or lack of it.

I really hope the characters in King Lear are not an accurate perception of what people are really like.

Because, seriously, everyone (aka. Goneril, Regan, Burgundy, Edmund...etc.) is so driven by greed! And THEN everyone else (Gloucester, King Lear) is so willing to be deceived by the above persons!...(minus Burgundy).

Really though, you would think that with the way that Gloucester goes on about how much he loves Edgar because he's a legit son, and how well he knows Edgar, and how much he loooooves Edgar, he would be a little slower to accept a story about Edgar betraying him. But nooo, he's eager and willing to believe Edmund's lies. No hesitation.

And King Lear is so quick to conclude from one speck of time that Cordelia actually doesn't love him. Right, pretty safe to assume that the previous however-old-she-is years don't really matter at all.

The familial love in Shakespeare's plays often has such big misunderstandings.

Gloucester  "He cannot be such a monster--"

Edmund "Nor is not, sure."

Gloucester "To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him."

But if Gloucester really loved Edgar, wouldn't he have a harder time believing that Edgar is trying to kill him? It reminds me of Hamlet, and how Claudius misunderstood so greatly what a father's love is really like. (See previous post about that--Claudius, the False.) Except that Gloucester really is Edgar's father, sadly. What a downer.