2.2.

Political Violence, Epidemic Cruelty and Pain in Edward

Bond’s Lear

Everything that acts is a cruelty.26

Edward Bond’s Lear was first performed in 1971, at the Royal Court
Theatre. This play, which is a re-writing of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, was
written as “the Vietnam War rose to its final genocidal peak”27 and it was much
influenced by the historical background of its time. Influenced by the violent
background of the twentieth century, Bond creates a play by altering many
characteristics of the Shakespearean version through the use of excessively violent
scenes. He tries to create an optimistic end expressing a desire to believe that there
could be an end to the oppression28, violence and suffering caused by totalitarian
regimes and egoistical ruler classes. With the repetitive pattern of the play he
shows that the relationship between the rulers and the public is always based on the

1 violence and suffering of both parties and this creates an unbreakable vicious
circle. The play also shows how cruelty is epidemic in certain instances and how
violence began to be called science or necessity to maintain the established order.
Lear is a king who tries to protect his country from possible enemies by
constructing a wall around his lands. Yet the building of the wall is not desired by
the public because of the need of a work force which the farmers also have to
provide and the poor conditions for the workers cause many deaths. Fontanelle and
Bodice, Lear’s daughters, finding their father wrong, secretly marry the Duke of
North and the Duke of Cornwall who are Lear’s enemies. At the end of the war
between Lear, Cornwall and North, Lear, with Bodice help, is defeated.
Warrington, who does not respond to both sisters’ requests to betray Lear, is held
captive and tortured. Lear takes refuge in the house of a farmer called the

26
Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre and Cruelty”, The Theater and Its Double, New York, Grove
Pres Inc., 1958, p. 85.
27
Colin Chambers et. al., Playwright’s Progress: Patterns of Postwar British Drama, Oxford,
Amber Lane Press Ltd., 1987, p. 159.
28
Lear is shot while he’s digging the wall, the workers who watch him leave the stage quickly, but
one of them looks back. It brings into mind the hope for change.
Edward Bond, “Lear”, Plays: 2, London, Methuen Drama, 1998, p. 102.

53
Gravedigger’s Boy and his wife Cordelia, who is pregnant. The soldiers, who look
for Lear, kill the Gravedigger’s Boy, rape Cordelia, and take Lear to prison. Then,
workers and farmers ruled by Cordelia rebel against the rule of Fontanelle and
Bodice, and take the country over. Fontanelle and Bodice are executed while
Lear’s life is spared though he is blinded. Lear then returns to the Gravedigger’s
Boy’s house which is now occupied by others and he begins to live there. Every
day many people come to listen to him, yet Cordelia’s rule does not prove to be
different; she continues to build the wall though Lear tries to tell her that it should
be pulled down. The play closes when Lear falls dead while he is digging the wall
with a shovel.
Bond creates a world order which is based on excessive violence. The king
is not like Shakespeare’s Lear who wants to divide his lands between his
daughters. Lear is still in power in Lear and his wall, which is non-existent in the
Shakespearian version, symbolizes his desire to be in power by protecting himself
and oppressing others, though he says it is for the welfare of his people. The wall is
“the symbol both of his power and its paranoia.”29 The daughters are similar to the
versions in King Lear; they have a desire for power, and a tendency to be cruel.
Cordelia, who is not the innocent and honest little daughter of Lear in this version,
also becomes a cruel figure. What is dominant in the text is the rootless violence,
cruelty towards others and the metaphysical anguish which comes after the
realization of the dehumanization of the system. As Christopher Innes suggests:

Lear (1971) uses many of the characters and situations from Shakespeare’s play
but alters them to make a despairing statement about human brutality and
inhumanity. Selfishness, callousness, and violence continued to be
preoccupations of Bond’s later works…30

Yet we know that Shakespeare’s King Lear also thematises violence, cruelty and
suffering. What Edward Bond changes in his text is the emphasis on these themes
as Jenny S. Spencer also suggests:

29
Christopher Innes, op. cit., p. 158.
30
Brockett, et. al., op. cit., p. 533.

54
 What separates Bond from Shakespeare on the question of the representation of
violence is this constant move from the metaphoric to the literal, from the
verbal gesture to the concrete action, from symbolic to physical reality… 31

To begin with the differences between two plays, there are changes in the
names of the characters. Instead of Goneril and Regan, Bond chooses Fontanelle
which means the skull of a baby and Bodice means “corset.”32 As Michael
Patterson indicates,

[I]n Bond’s play Goneril and Regan appear as Fontanelle and Bodice, the first
name perhaps suggesting the rather infantile quality of her character, the second
possibly indicating her sense of being constrained.33

Fontanelle’s child-like behaviour is balanced with Bodice’s controlling character

who handles everything. Yet although Bodice becomes the ruler of the country
after her father’s defeat and Cornwall’s and North’s unsuccessful escape, she also
suffers because she has to take over control. Besides changing the daughters’
names, Bond also changes the third daughter’s relationship along with her social
standing; Cordelia has no relation with Lear, she is the wife of a farmer. As
Fontanelle and Bodice are seen as the daughters of a cruel king it is clear that they
learned from their father to be cruel, but Cordelia who leads a much more basic life
also feels grudge after the death of her husband, and being raped by the soldiers
which causes her to miscarry her baby. Thus Bond creates a connection between
Lear’s daughters and Cordelia. Cordelia, like Fontanelle and Bodice, is the
daughter of an authority figure, a priest and it was her father who “taught her
everything”34, as Fontanelle and Bodice learn from their father. When Cordelia
takes the control over the country, she also adapts to the system, and continues to
build the wall.
Thus Bond makes a reference to the oppression and cruelty of the system;
in its nature it carries the characteristics of oppression, violence, and suffering. It

31
Jenny S. Spencer, Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press1992, p. 83.
32
“Bodice” and “Fontanelle”, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, ed. by. Frederick C.
Mish, USA, Merriam-Webster, 2004, p. 138 and 487.
33
Michael Patterson, Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Pres, 2003, p. 142.
34
Edward Bond, “Lear”, Plays: 2, London, Methuen Drama, 1998, p. 40.

55
also works upon the powerful characters, who are rulers. So, everyone is a victim
to the system but also contributes to it by obeying its mechanism, and suffers, yet,
this acceptance curtains the reality of suffering:

We are like caged animals, but, instead of turning on our keepers, we fawn on
them because they bring us sufficient food, so we vent our frustration and
animosity on our fellow captives. 35

The violence and cruelty in the play causes suffering, and suffering again creates
violence. In fact, this vicious circle can be considered as the cage in which the
characters are stuck. It is gradually regarded as ordinary so that, it is no longer
questioned. But, as already said before, through Lear’s personal development and
enlightenment, Bond tries to make an attempt to awaken the audience to this
reality, because for Bond, this is the reality of the world we live in under
capitalism.
The each level of suffering and violence is visible in Bond’s play. In Lear,
the suffering which is caused by the relationships with other men is dominant in
the text.36 Yet, here the suffering that comes from the others also derives from the
social system that is constructed by the people, and this level is the dominant one
in the text. Furthermore, rather than suffering because of one’s own body or the
external world, it is again the human beings who create suffering. Men destroy the
external world and their own existence for the sake of power struggles. Hence, the
physical violence is mainly dominant to the text, yet, it is not easy to separate
symbolic violence, which derives from social construction and the social rules,
from the physical one. Each of them triggers one another.
One of the most important changes from the original text is the change both
in the title of the play and the title of Lear. He removes the “king” from the title,
therefore, he removes Lear’s social standing, his absolute power, and also makes
him one of the others, as if to signify that what Lear goes through, his cruelty, his
fall from power, his suffering can happen to any of us. Lear as a person is more
important than Lear as king:

35
Michael Patterson, op. cit., p. 138.
36
See the quotation taken from Freud in the “Introduction” on page 9.

56
 The major shift of emphasis is hinted at in the title: the dropping of
‘King’ immediately implies that Bond is not interested in the royal nature of the
king but in his function as an individual in an oppressive state, the character of
which Lear gradually discerns in the course of the play.37

“King”, symbolizes the absolute power and a person whose “power inspire(s)
fear”, he is also infallible in his “decrees… and his judgements instinct with justice
and goodness”38, and as in many mythologies and in Christian terminology, the
king is the God on earth. As the title “king” suggests he is the one in power.
However the removal of the title “king” shows that these connotations of the word
“king” are no longer valid; goodness, justice, and infallibility of the instinct to
rightly judge are taken from him. Thus, Lear, and through him, any individual can
signify the bad, the unjust and the cruel. Lear by viewing his people as his sheep
and thus by making an allusion to the Old Testament39, supports the idea of being
in the position of God:

I gave my life to these people. I’ve seen armies on their hands and knees in
blood, insane women feeding dead children at their empty breasts, dying men
spitting blood at me with their last breath, our brave young men in tears – (…)
They are my sheep and if one of them is lost I’d take fire to hell to bring him
out. I loved and cared for all my children…40

Yet, what is also revealed in this quotation is his belief that he loves his people and
that he sacrificed himself for them. In reality however, it is them who are
sacrificed. His words show that he believes that this was done by the enemy, but it
was he himself who made them suffer and how he created hatred in them, a man
spits blood at him with his last breath. The fear of experiencing the same war
atmosphere is why he wants to build the wall, yet the desire to protect both his
people and his power by the construction of the wall becomes another way to make
the people suffer.
Thus, the main symbol of violence in the play is the wall. The wall not only
makes people suffer, it also kills them. The play opens with the accidental death of
37
Michael Patterson, op. cit., pp. 141-142.
38
Jean Chevalier, et. al., “King”, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Trans. by John Buchanan-
Brown, London,Penguin Books Ltd., 1996, pp. 568.
39
David’s confidence in God’s grace: “The Lord is my shepherd”, The Old Testament, Psalms
23:1.
40
Bond, op. cit., p. 21.

57
a worker who works on the wall, and ends with the death of Lear who is digging
the wall. This wall which Lear calls “my wall”41, and wants to build in order to
protect his people from the enemies, in fact symbolizes closure, separation and
limitedness:

Traditionally the wall or great wall was the enclosure which guarded and shut
in a world to avoid the invasion of evil influences originating at some lower
level. Walls had the disadvantage of restricting the realms which they
enclosed…42

Though Lear says “[M]y wall will make you free”43, the wall turns his people into
slaves; farmers are forced to work on the wall for the need of workforce, and it
causes a threat that “the countryside would be left derelict.”44 People are taken
from where they live and forced to work on the wall under bad conditions and they
are treated like animals. What Lear says for the workers is not different from his
inspection of the wood for the construction. When he sees the dead body under the
tarpaulin, the engineers’ argument and the following speech prove that compared
with the wall, the workers have no importance:

LEAR (points to tarpaulin). What’s that?

ENGINEER. Materials for the –
WARRINGTON (to FOREMAN). Who is it?
FOREMAN. Workman.
WARRINGTON. What?
FOREMAN. Accident, sir.
LEAR. Who left that wood in the mud?
ENGINEER. That’s just delivered. We’re moving that to –
LEAR. It’s been rotting there for weeks (To WARRINGTON.) They’ll never
finish! Get more men on it. The officers must make the men work!
…
LEAR. Show me this body.
…
Blow on the head.
FOREMAN. Axe.
LEAR. What?
FOREMAN. An axe, sir. Fell on him.

41
Bond, “Lear”, op. cit., p. 2.
42
Jean Chevalier, et. al., “Wall”, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Trans. by John Buchanan-
Brown, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 1996, p. 1076.
43
Bond, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
44
ibid., p. 16.

58
 LEAR. It’s a flogging crime to delay work. (To WARRINGTON.) You must
deal with this fever. They treat their men like cattle. When they finish work
they must be kept in dry huts. All these huts are wet. You waste men.45

Though Lear learns about the death of a worker, the wood which is left in the mud
is more important for him. And the health of the workers is important as long as it
speeds up the construction of the wall.
He wastes his men for the construction of this wall. He kills the Third
Worker, supposing that he is a traitor whose axe kills another workman
accidentally:
LEAR. (…) (To FOREMAN.) Who dropped the axe?
…
FOREMAN and SOLDIER push THIRD WORKER forward.
LEAR. Court martial him. Fetch a firing squad. A drumhead trial for sabotage.
Quiet murmur of surprise…
…
LEAR (to THIRD WORKER). Prisoner of war?
FOREMAN. No. One of our men. A farmer.
LEAR. I understand! He has a grudge. I took him off his land.
…
LEAR. (…) He killed a workman on the wall. That alone makes him a traitor.
…
(He shoots THIRD WORKER …)46

Lear’s desire to kill him does not actually derive from his thinking that he is a real
traitor. Lear himself is aware of the fact that what happened was just an accident:

BODICE. (…) There was an accident. That’s all.

LEAR (half aside to her). Of course there was an accident. But the work is
slow. I must do something to make the officers move. That’s what I came for,
otherwise my visit’s wasted.47

Lear’s words show how rootless violence has become. In order to quicken the
construction of the wall, he does not hesitate to kill a worker, though he says that
these people are his “sheep and if one of them is lost (he)’d take fire to hell to bring
him out.” 48

45
ibid., p. 16.
46
ibid., p. 20.
47
ibid., p. 18.
48
ibid., p. 21.

59
 This wall is not only a physical barrier between countries; it’s also a barrier
between man and nature. The construction of the wall needs wood and earth, the
use of each one is a harm given to nature. As Chambers and Prior suggests:

[T]he offence against nature is most clearly symbolized in Lear’s and

then Cordelia’s earth wall. It has come to represent all the acts of natural
destruction to which society , with its technological control has become
irretrievably bound.49

The wall which becomes a destructive force to nature causes the suffering
that comes from the external world; the mud wastes the lives of workers. And the
wall does not only physically separate Lear’s country from the enemies’, but
psychologically separates Lear from his people and his daughters and creates
suffering for both parties.
His childish obstinacy on the building of the wall makes Fontanelle and
Bodice marry Lear’s enemies, which can also be seen as a desire to demolish the
wall because their grooms also ask this “as (a) part of the marriage contract.”50 It
can be interpreted as the daughters’ desire to escape from the cruelty of their father
which frightens them:

FONTANELLE. Happiness at last! I was always terrified of him.51

Yet, to be able to pull down the wall, it is necessary to remove the symbolical wall
that stands between the father and the daughters. However, Lear’s insistence on the
construction of the wall makes this impossible and he literally says that there is a
wall between them:

LEAR. […] I built my wall against you as well as my other enemies!52

Thus, he turns his daughters into his enemies because according to him they chose
to be the on the other side of the wall which symbolizes danger and death for him

49
Chambers, et al., op. cit., p. 159.
50
Bond, op. cit., p. 20.
51
ibid., p. 22.
52
ibid., p. 21.

60
because he knows that North and Cornwall want to take the revenge of their
fathers, so feeling threatened he draws a line between himself and his daughters
which shows the wall’s invisible existence in human relations.
He does not give them punishment for marrying his enemies yet later he
shows how cruel he can be when he talks to Warrington:

LEAR. […] How could I trust myself to them? My daughters are claimed
outlaws, without rights of prisoners of war. They van be raped – or murdered.
Why should they be held for trial? Their crimes aren’t covered by my laws.
Where does their vileness come from?53

Though he says that his daughters are too good for this world, when Bodice says
that to kill the Third Worker will be an injustice54, his attitude towards his
daughters totally changes. He even does not care about their being raped or
murdered; he does not give them the rights that he even gives to a prisoner of war.
Yet he forgets the true nature of his daughters’ situation when he asks “Where does
their vileness come from?” It is Lear himself who teaches them to be cruel:

BODICE. Father, if you kill this man it will be an injustice.

LEAR. My dear, you want to help me, but you must let me deal with the things
I understand. Listen and learn.55

He always underestimates his daughters; he does this depending upon his power as
a father and a king. At first, he sees his daughters as kind and merciful, but because
he regards them like that, he does not want them to meddle with the deeds he
understands. The interruptions of Bodice and her not hesitating to shout that she
disassociates herself from the execution of the worker make him angry, because
she thus undermines his authority. The secret marriages, therefore, are the climax
of his anger toward them, yet he does not show his aggression directly to his
daughters. As Bodice and Fontanelle try to dissuade him from his childish
obstinacy of constructing the wall and speak of their husbands, Lear reflects his
anger for them to the Third Worker:

53
ibid., p. 23.
54
ibid., p. 18.
55
ibid., p. 18.

61
 BODICE. I’m marrying North.
FONTANELLE. And I’m marrying Cornwall.
LEAR. (points to the THIRD WORKER). Tie him straight! He’s falling!
BODICE. So now you don’t have to shoot him. Our husbands could never
allow you to, anyway.
FONTANELLE. I know you’ll get on with my husband. He’s very
understanding, he knows how to deal with old people.
LEAR. Straighter.
BODICE. You’ll soon learn to respect them like your sons.
LEAR. I have no sons! I have no daughters.56

Lear’s attitude to the Third Worker is like the “spontaneous gesture of the man
who kicks his dog because he dares not kick his wife or boss.”57 Or as existentialist
psychologist Rollo May suggest, the aggression is directed to a certain someone,
but violence does not need to be so.

When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch

has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object related – that
is, we know at whom and what we are angry. But in violence, the object-
relation disintegrates, and we swing wildly, hitting whoever is within range.
One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear, one
loses awareness of the environment and wants only to act out this inner
compulsion to do violence, come what may.58

The aggression that he cannot direct against his daughters is directed against the
worker. This also shows why the daughters are vile; the question is indeed a
rhetoric one, because it is he himself who teaches them to be cruel. He is not
intentionally cruel to his daughters. It can be suggested that though his way of
showing his love to them does not include compassion and warmth, he loves them,
he always address to them as “my dear child” or “my poor child”. In a vision of the
past we see that he scolds Bodice for wearing her dead mother’s dress:

LEAR. […] (BODICE gets into the dress and comes down to him. He points at
her.) Take it off!
BODICE. No.
LEAR. Take it off. Your mother’s dress!
BODICE. She’s dead! She gave it to me!

56
ibid., pp. 19-20.
57
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory, London, The Athlone Press,
1995, p. 9.
58
Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York, W. W.
Norton, 1972, p. 183.

62
 LEAR (pointing). Take it off!
BODICE. No!
LEAR. Yes, or you will always wear it! (He pulls her to him.) Bodice! My poor
child, you might as well have worn her shroud.59

He scolds her because he fears that Bodice might die, too, because mother’s dress
symbolizes death. As father represents culture, mother represents nature; therefore
nature also represents death for Lear. As he tries to defeat death by building a wall
in the midst of nature, his aggressive behaviour to make Bodice take off the dress
is also an attempt to outlive death. This can be inferred as his love to his daughters,
but the problem is even when he seems to be caring, he shows his love with
aggression as seen in the above quotation. Yet it is a relationship that depends on
his daughters submission when they act against his authority, his kind and merciful
daughters who will govern the country so well after he dies, suddenly turn into
cruel monsters:

LEAR: […] It is perverted to want your pleasure where it makes others

suffer… where will your ambition end? You will throw old men from their
coffins, break children’s legs, pull the hair from old women’s heads, make
young men walk the streets in beggary and cold while their wives grow empty
and despair… You have done this to me. The people will judge between you
and me.60

When we judge between him and his daughters it is easy to see that there is not
much difference between them. What he thinks possible for them to do is what he
himself has done in the past. The above passage is very reminiscent of the situation
of his people in the war.61 He is just able to justify himself by saying that he has
done everything for his people, while his daughters’ is an egoistical ambition. He is
not able to see yet, that he continues to cause the same suffering by insisting upon
the construction of the wall, and he is not yet able to see that his daughters do what
they have learned from their father. It is too late when he begins to gain an insight
and understand what he has done to his daughters. He begins to realize his fault
when he sees Fontanelle’s body on the autopsy table:

59
Bond, op. cit., p. 53.
60
ibid., p. 21.
61
See above quotation from Bond, op. cit., p. 21, on page 51.

63
 LEAR. She sleeps inside like a lion and a lamb and a child. The things
are so beautiful […] If I had known she was so beautiful… If I had known this
beauty and patience and care, how I would have loved her.
[…]
Did I make this – and destroy it?
[…]
I destroyed her! I knew nothing, saw nothing, learned nothing! Fool! Fool!
Worse than I knew! […] Look at my dead daughter!
[…]
Look! I killed her! Her blood is in my hands! Destroyer! Murderer! And now I
must begin again. […] I must walk in weariness and bitterness […] I must open
my eyes and see!62

He becomes aware of the fact that it is he himself who destroyed his daughters’
inner beauty, thus he is responsible for their physical deaths also. The realization
gives way to metaphysical anguish which opens his eyes to the reality of the
system that he is part of.
The system turns people into both victimizers and victims. Bodice taking
over the control begins to govern the country. Though she begins to pull down the
wall, it does not mean that she is less cruel than her father or Cordelia, who will
continue to build the wall in the end. Together with her sister they torture
Warrington, as if to recall Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, they cut out his
tongue and order the soldier to beat him up and jump on him, in this way they will
prevent him from speaking and making signs to reveal the truth about Bodice and
Fontanelle’s letters which asked him to betray Lear and share their beds. The
torture scene contains excessive violence which comes from Fontanelle’s orders:

FONTANELLE. Use the boot! (SOLDIER A kicks him.) Jump on him! (She
pushes SOLDIER A.) Jump on his head!
SOLDIER A. Lay off lady, lay off! ‘Oo’s killin’ ‘im, me or you?
BODICE (knits). One plain, two pearl, one plain.
FONTANELLE. Throw him up and drop him. I want to hear him drop.
[…]
O Christ why did I cut his tongue out? I want to hear him scream!
[…]
O yes, tears and blood I wish my father was here. I wish he would see him.
Look at his hands! (…) Smash his hands!
SOLDIER A and FONTANELLE jump on WARRINGTON’s hands.
Kill his hands! Kill his feet! Jump on it- all of it! Look at his hands like boiling
crabs! Kill it! Kill all of it! Kill him inside! Make him dead! Father! Father! I
want to sit on his lungs!
[…]

62
ibid., pp. 73-74.

64
 O let me sit on his lungs. Get them out for me.63

This violent scene also reveals that this aggression and violence does not only
derive from the anger that rises from being refused by him, but also from the hatred
they feel for their father. They see him as a substitute image for their father which
is understood when Fontanelle’s shouts at Warrington: “[F]ather! Father”. Their
violence towards him is a vent for the suppressed feelings for their father, in a way
they are taking revenge for what they have suffered. There is also another
important symbol in this scene of violence; Bodice (since her marriage) is
continually knitting, and until she uses her needles to torture Warrington, she never
stops knitting. Besides being a female activity, knitting is a way to suppress her
aggression because knitting is an activity which teaches the female to be
submissive:

The domestication of sewing was one means of inculcating femininity…

And yet the feminist historian finds herself ambivalent in trying to assess how
successful a means of suppression sewing actually was. The silent, hunched
soldiers of the (leisured) embroiderer can be read as a posture of
submission…64

Yet when she pulls the needles from the knitting and uses them to poke his ears,
the needles cease to be the signs of female submission they become the tools of
violence. In one of her articles Helga Novak draws attention to Knitting needles’
resemblance to weapons:

An army of stitches in motion. The knitting needles are the bayonets. That’s
probably why they’re locked away at night, so nobody gets hurt.65

Her using the knitting needles as her tools for torture causes the running of the
knitting which symbolizes the impossibility of returning to the older state. From
now on she is also physically involved in the system. Then we see her sleeping

63
ibid., pp. 28-29.
64
Meliss Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-patriarchal Reconstruction of Female
Sacrality, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1996, p. 151.
65
Helga Novak, “Palisades, or Time Spent in a Mad House”. German Feminism: Reading in
Politics and Literature, ed. by Edith Hoshins, Albany, state of New York Press, 1984, p. 92.

65
over a desk, and her knitting bag is full of documents66, which shows that
governing the country has replaced her female activities. It also shows that she no
longer needs a substitute object to reflect her aggression on. As the ruler of the
country now she has all the rights to do as she likes yet, she also suffers from
having to be the one in control:

BODICE. War. Power. (Off, FONTANELLE laughs briefly, and then the AIDE
laughs briefly.) I’m forced to sit at this desk, work with my sister, walk beside
my husband. They say decide this and that, but I don’t decide anything. My
decisions are forced on me (…) I’m trapped. (…) I hated being a girl but at
least I was happy sometimes. And it was better when I grew up, I could be
myself (…) I was almost free! I made so many plans, one day I’d be my own
master! Now I have all the power… and I’m a slave.

Bourdieu indicates that when females have the chance they use the power against
men who dominate them:

Being symbolically condemned to resignation and discretion, women can

exercise some degree of power only by turning the strength of the strong
against them or by accepting the need to efface themselves, and in any case, to
deny a power that they can only exercise vicariously…67

However, Bodice’s outbreak shows how the system works upon the holders of
power, too. Like a corset it squeezes the ones who are subject to it and makes
breathing impossible for them and it also changes their natural shape. Though the
system gives Bodice the right to victimize others it also turns her into a victim. She
is obliged to “efface” herself in order to be able to use her power. Thus, she does
everything because she feels forced to do so. Though she has all the power she has
no chance to be free because the system she has taken over dehumanizes her as
well.
In the text, we see that it is the victimized people who later hold the title of
victimizer. Bodice and Fontanelle are victimized by their father though he does not
intend to do so, yet then they hold the power, they turn into victimizers themselves.
Another example of a victimized character that turns into a victimizer is Cordelia.
When Lear first meets the Gravedigger’s Boy and Cordelia, he actually enters a

66
Bond, op. cit., p. 69.
67
Bourdieu, op. cit. p. 32.

66
world which the cruelty of the system has not yet reached physically. Dethroned by
his daughter, King Lear takes refuge in the Gravedigger’s Boy’s house and begins
to work for him by looking after the pigs. The Gravedigger’s Boy who chooses life
over death by quitting his father’s job as a gravedigger, starts his life as a farmer.
He represents innocence, the ideal model in the text, which gives without taking,
which is always optimistic and helpful. Yet Lear’s entrance in to their life changes
everything. Cordelia feels uncomfortable because of his existence around their
house, and when the Gravedigger’s Boy is down in the well she forces Lear to
leave:

WIFE (Cordelia). […] You’re not stopping here. I won’t have you.
LEAR. He needs me. He said so.
WIFE. I’m not having any dirty old tramps about, I’m carrying. I mustn’t let
myself get upset.
[…]
WIFE. […] Please go- and don’t tell him I made you.68

In contrast to her husband, Cordelia is not that innocent. She has a tendency to be
violent which can be gathered from her reaction to Lear. Though he is in a
miserable state Cordelia wants him to leave, there is the existence of a personal
wall that Cordelia builds around her even before she takes the control over. As
forLear, he falls to the state of the victim while he was the victimizer. Yet, even in
this state he is able to act egoistically. Personal suffering and fear is more
important than anything:

LEAR. He asked me to stay! No, I won’t go! (…) he said I could stay. He
won’t break his word I’m too old to look after myself. I can’t live in ditches and
barns and beg for scraps and hire myself to peasants! No, I won’t be at
everyone’s call! My daughters sent you! You go! It’s you who’re destroying
this place! We must get rid of you!69

Lear is an intruder in their house, yet to feel safe he wants to send away Cordelia
who is pregnant. He creates a bond with the Boy and tries to exclude Cordelia. Yet
what he says prove to be wrong, because it is Lear himself who destroys the place.

68
Bond, op. cit., p. 41.
69
Ibid, p. 41.

67
The soldiers of his daughters come to find him, but they not only take Lear, but
also kill the Gravedigger’s boy and rape Cordelia. This scene contains excessive
and irrational violence. In fact, Lear’s order which gives the right to the rape and
murder of his daughters work upon the inhabitants of the house he takes refuge.
Bond tries to show that system turns people into victimizers through the behaviour
of the Soldiers. Yet we do not know what the real order that is given to them
includes. Only thing we know is they are trying to find Lear. The murder of the
Gravedigger’s boy, or the rape of Cordelia are the signs of humans’ capability of
violence, because rather than doing these as an order, they take pleasure from what
happens:

Her (Cordelia’s) head is down and she covers her face with her hands,
SOLDIER D is preparing to rape her…
(…)
SERGEANT (to SOLDIER D). Do that inside.
LEAR. She’s pregnant.
SOLDIER D. It can play with the end.
(…)
There is blood on SOLDIER E’s face, neck, hands, clothes and boots. In the
house CORDELIA gives a high, short gasp.
SOLDIER E (muttering contentedly). An’ I’ll ‘ave ‘er reekin’ a pig blood.
Somethin’ t’ write ‘ome t’ tell mother.70

The soldiers in the Gravedigger’s boy are far from doing their jobs; they use
purposeless and arbitrary violence which causes the destruction of a family, which
in return comes out as mental suffering, hatred and revenge. When we take into
consideration the words of Soldier A, who tortures Warrington, these soldiers’
attitudes can be seen as their personal cruelty:

SOLDIER A. It’s all over. Walking offal! don’t blame me, I’ve got a job t’ do.
If we was fightin’ again t’morra I could end up envyin’ you anytime. Come on
then, less ‘ave yer. Yer’ll live if yer want to.71

While Soldier A admits that he has to do whatever he is ordered, Sergeant, Soldier

D and E are a material examples of the cruelty that is inherent to each person. The

70
Ibid, pp. 44-45.
71
Ibid, p. 30.

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materialization of cruelty through physical violence is one of the main destructive
forces in the play. When the soldiers are leaving Lear says:

LEAR (stands). O burn the house! You’ve murdered the husband, slaughtered
the cattle, poisoned the well, raped the mother, killed the child – you must burn
the house! You’re soldiers – you must do your duty!72

He asks them to burn the house, because the worst has happened, in deed what the
soldiers do here is similar to Lear’s orders for his daughters. He does not even give
them the rights of prisoner of war and he says that they can be raped or murdered.
And what his daughters do is the same. The use of violence is like an epidemic
illness which is contaminated by interaction with the one who uses it. René Girard
directly refers to this epidemic character of violence as “contamination” and the
one who uses it as “contaminated”:

Contamination is a terrible thing, and only those who are already contaminated
would wilfully expose themselves to it.
If even an accidental contact with a “contaminated” being can spread the
impurity, it goes without saying that a violent and hostile encounter will
guarantee infection. Therefore … whenever the violence is inevitable, it is best
that the victim be pure, untainted by any involvement in the dispute.73

Lear is contaminated; he killed his enemies in the battlefield and swore to kill their
sons. Bodice and Fontanelle are infected because they were the closest to him. Yet
Lear carries this infectious illness of violence wherever he goes. He not only
causes the Boy and Cordelia to suffer from violence, but also infects Cordelia with
the same disease. It is the Carpenter who kills the soldier who rapes her, and thus
becomes contaminated, too. So Cordelia, the Carpenter and the others, who suffer
from the existent government, create a rebel army and take over the country. Yet,
like the other systems, Cordelia’s system does not prove to be different; she
continues to build the wall, she executes Fontanelle and Bodice, but sets Lear free,
yet, in time, the position Lear takes begins to disturb her.

72
Ibid, pp. 43-45.
73
Girard, op. cit., p. 28.

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 The main problem arises when the Carpenter and the Fourth Prisoner agree
on a small experiment on Lear, though the Carpenter knows that Cordelia does not
want anything to be done to Lear. Yet the Carpenter gives permission to the
gorging out of his eyes which they call a scientific experiment. The blinded Lear’s
support is now the ghost of the Gravedigger’s Boy. Physical blindness lets Lear
gain a new insight, blindness to the physical world opens his eyes to the reality, his
physical pain alludes to the painstaking entrance into the world of reality which is
consist of cruelty, violence and suffering:

LEAR. You. (The GHOST starts to unfasten LEAR.) Tell me the pain will
stop! This pain must stop! O stop, stop, stop!
GHOST. It will stop. Sometimes it might come back, but you’ll learn to bear it.
I can stay with you now you need me.74

The pain of realization, as the Ghost says, is something that he will learn to bear. It
will always be there, but he will learn how to cope with it.
With Lear’s realization of the cruelty of the system and the existence of the
wall, Act Three opens similar to Act One, Scene Six. Lear is again in the
Gravedigger’s Boy’s house which is now occupied by Thomas, Susan and many
others. Thomas serves the Gravedigger’s Boy’s role while the pregnant Susan
plays Cordelia’s role. But the difference is that Lear is now listened to by many
people, and he tries to open these people’s eyes to the injustice of the system,
because, as it has been said before, Cordelia’s government is in no way different
from Lear’s. The problem in Cordelia’s government is the same as in Bodice’s, for
it is based upon hatred, not on a change in the system. Cordelia herself points out
her hatred:

CORDELIA. […] To fight like us you must hate, we can’t trust a man unless he
hates. Otherwise he has no use.75

A system based upon hatred creates no difference, neither for the rulers, nor the
public. Ben, who was an orderly when Lear was in prison, has now joined Lear,

74
Bond, op. cit., p. 78.
75
Ibid., p. 58.

70
and he wants to give himself up to the soldiers and return to the camp of the wall
where he could try to enlighten people for a revolution. Yet Lear does not even
listen to him. Lear, in the end, goes to the wall which once belonged to him, and
begins to dig it with a shovel, and is shot to death by the farmer’s son who is a
soldier now. The act in itself carries the egoistical side of Lear. Without telling
anyone, he does go to the wall and rather than affecting multitudes, he just
completes his own development in this change. The only worker who turns his
back and looks at his body at the end of the play can be interpreted as the hope of
an awakening in people, yet as the previous examples of death on the wall show,
this scene can easily be forgotten.
When the play’s plot is taken into consideration, the vicious circle between
violence and suffering, being victim and the victimizer becomes obvious. The
personal suffering and unhappiness related to the oppression of the social and the
political system is what lies behind the text, and it comes out as physical violence
on the surface, As Innes suggests,

Repression leads to aggression, and this aggression is the driving force behind
social progress. Thus, all social activity is presented as moralized violence.76

Though physical violence dominates the text on the surface, the symbolic violence
is what goes under all these violence and suffering. The socially constructed rules
are what give some characters the right to use violence; although they create
suffering and aggression in the others. The power struggle which even justifies
excessive physical violence causes suffering on both sides. Symbolic violence, as
Bourdieu points out, works upon the members of a society invisibly or one cannot
realize it because it is too familiar, but its impact is enormous:

Symbolic force is a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and

as if by magic, without any physical constraint; but this magic works only on
the basis of the dispositions deposited, like springs, at the deepest level of the
body… (It is) all the more powerful because it is for the most part exerted
invisibly and insidiously through insensible familiarization with a symbolically

76
Innes, op. cit., p. 160.

71
 structured physical world and early, prolonged experience of interactions
informed by the structures of domination.77

The rules of relationships between a king and his people, father and his daughters,
males and females are all defined by the social construction. Any tension that
arises between these couples emerges because of one side’s refusal or faithfulness
to conform these rules. Bond argues here that this kind of social construction is the
main reason of violence, people become enemies, a father turns his back to his
daughters, and innocent people become the victims of violence deriving from the
power struggle of rulers. Lear reveals that, like in Endgame, suffering and
aggression are never-ending processes. And though, as said before, a worker turns
his head and looks at the dead body of Lear, the play does not represent a solution
or give a hope about future by showing that every system repeats itself. Especially
the death of the Gravedigger’s boy leaves no hope for the future of human beings,
while Endgame demonstrates the lack of emotional ties between the characters in
never-ending, self-repeating plot of the play in which nothing much happens, Lear
draws a worse picture of humanity which includes hatred, aggression and violence
at its worst even in the relationship of a father and daughter. The wall – which
represents both physical and psychological barriers between people and which is
the material symbol of violence against both human beings and nature – is the only
thing that stays on stage when the play ends.

77
Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 36.

72