King Lear, King David—doppelgängers?
Part one of a two part series on idols, archetypes, and tragedy.
One blessing, or curse, of reading too much is all the déjà vu.
The more you cover, the more likely a moment, a character, or a whole story arc will look strangely familiar—just like that cat crossing the hallway in The Matrix.
When it comes to commonly used plots, archetypes, and even film and T.V. tropes, story gurus like Robert McKee shout it from the rooftops—there’s nothing new under the sun.
Sometimes it’s obvious: Avatar is Pocahontas.
And Pocahontas is Queen Esther, with some cast and scenery flipped around.
The Mandalorian is Lone Wolf and Cub, which, in some ways, resembles Abraham and Isaac.
Breaking Bad is Macbeth, not to mention Faust.
Strip the paint off and most stories are copies…of copies.
Of a Bible story.
It’s astonishing how much can be traced back to the source:
Breaking Bad is Macbeth is Faust is Adam and Eve meet the Serpent… is Satan falling from Heaven—same deal, more or less.
To test this out, and to have some fun bouncing a banger of a stage play off some layman Bible reading, I’m going to clear the table and spread out two lead characters—King David of the Old Testament and the long-suffering King Lear, selfsame ruler from Shakespeare’s gut-punch of a tragedy.
I’ll start and come back to a parallel moment in both narratives, something that fits both Kings to a T—the archetype of an exiled ruler, wailing over the death of a grown, but favored child.
While I’m at it, I’ll tap some overlapping themes: human agency, love and loss, false appearances, and not in the least, the idolatry of misplaced affection.
If it sounds like too much to cover, that’s probably because it is.
This is part one of a two-part series.
From here on out, it’s Lear then David—with heavy-hitting plot spoilers.
The mirror moment
In their respective downfalls, the Kings mirror each other for a considerable clip.
Both commit an original sin.
For David, lust and idleness tumbles to adultery. Before the dust settles, he’s impregnated Bathsheba, the gorgeous wife of his own warrior, Uriah the Hittite. When a cover up fails, he sends Uriah right to the front lines, which kills him off with none the wiser.
King Lear ruins himself and everyone around him by retiring early; by dividing his kingdom between two plotting, manipulative daughters named Regan and Goneril, and then banishing Cordelia, his youngest daughter and the only one he can trust.
Both Kings realize what they’ve done; but not before their world is up in flames.
Lear blows fuses when first Goneril, and then Regan break their agreement to host him, along with his personal army of a hundred knights. Hurt, powerless—and having exiled all his allies—Lear runs out in the middle of a nighttime downpour, shouting like a madman.
David soldiers through a few more complications—owing partly to his own negligence, his daughter Tamar is raped by her half-brother. Revenge is meted out by his handsome son Absalom, who then succeeds in leading an open revolt against David himself.
War spreads. Broken and impotent, both Kings wait for rescue.
And when help arrives, so does the unthinkable.
David’s army defeats Absalom’s forces, but Absalom himself is killed in the fray—against David’s pleas to spare his life. Hearing the news, David shouts and wails, confusing the population and mocking the warriors who saved his life and kingdom:
“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you!”1
Lear himself is rescued by Cordelia, (though exiled, she marries the King of France and comes back with an army). Regan and Goneril are killed off in an adulterous tug-of-war over Edmund, the Earl of Gloucester’s mischievous bastard son—no doubt a Ramsey Bolton prototype.
Near the end, Lear and Cordelia are captured—and before Edmund’s order can be reversed, Cordelia is executed on a brutal whim.
In a closing scene that no actor, audience, or for that matter parent can soon forget, the weeping Lear staggers onstage with Cordelia dead in his arms. And an ending that was often changed for performance, King Lear dies of grief, right on the spot.
It’s tragic fare for the hero to suffer… even for one small sin.
But unlike the blood-stained King David, who mourns his son, but then gets back up to lead the kingdom—Lear gets pounded. While both get their just desert, at least David’s comes his topped with mercy.
It’s a cosmic difference—and the gulf between a fragile, pagan world marked by strength and cunning, and what Peter J. Leithart calls the Deep Comedy of God’s redemption for a broken world.
No fault in our stars
For Shakespeare’s audiences, illiterate, but by no means stupid, Lear’s mistake is obvious.
By retiring early, he abdicates the divine-right that’s his responsibility. Not only does this leave him open to abuse and debasement—as much at the hands of his tongue-in-cheek court jester as his two scheming daughters—it throws hearts, minds, relationships, seasons, and even the weather out of balance.
On that note, the Groundlings probably weren’t surprised when Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan turned daylight black, sent nearby owls on a rampage, or prompted Duncan’s own horses to eat each other.
In their minds, everything was connected.
The universe held together with a colossal team effort, with everyone from Kings and nobles down to beggars, animals and even the plants staying in place on the hierarchy.
But as anyone who’s seen King Lear or read it closely knows, its characters are no puppets, either stationary or jilted around with no will of their own.
The play explores human agency as much as it does betrayal, showing that hellish realities are ushered in by individual choices—even well-intended ones, clouded by ignorance, misjudgment, or misplaced desire.
Right after gaslighting his father into thinking the legitimate son Edgar wants to kill him, Edmund the bastard just as much:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, …often the surfeit [caused by] of our own behavior …we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by planetary influence.2
In other words, people’s own choices guide their lives—not stars and planets, not sweeping forces climate change like systemic racism.
And certainly not the enneagram.
Characters, like all people, possess agency.
Evan Regan and Goneril, who give the appearance of tender daughters, gushing syrupy love for their father in public and then treating him like trash once they’ve got the kingdom.
Devoured by mascots
Lear’s suffering seems more plausible when we understand what sin he really commits.
In Act One, the proud ruler brings his three daughters to an official gathering, with all his nobles and even a lineup of well-heeled suitors. He then asks them to act like trained seals, offering portions of his kingdom to each daughter who counts the ways she loves him.
In Lear’s first speech, we hear someone as lofty as a Jeff Bezos—and no doubt as familiar with being praised, calling the shots, and saying out loud what he’s about to do…
Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.
Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.
Give me the map there. Know that we have divided in three our kingdom: and 'tis our fast intent to shake all cares and business from our age; conferring them on younger strengths…
…Tell me, my daughters, since now we will divest us both of rule, interest of territory, cares of state… which of you shall we say doth love us most?
Goneril, Our eldest-born, speak first.3
What might be most telling is Lear’s use of third person pronouns: ‘we have divided,’ ‘tis our fast intent,’ and ‘which of you shall say doth love us most…’
While using the ‘royal we’ was common practice for European monarchs, the sheer number of them rolls us over, smothering us in Lear’s sense of his own grandeur, authority, and showy benevolence. That he ends the speech by cueing his daughters to flatter him is no surprise.
Struggling between dancing Lear’s tune, (she knows what’s at stake) and telling Lear the truth, Cordelia chooses candor.
When she speaks, her response has no saccharine, and nothing of her father’s entitlement.
LEAR: What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?
CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.
LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
CORDELIA: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth: I love your majesty according to my bond; nor more nor less.
LEAR: How, how, Cordelia! mend your speech a little, lest it may mar your fortunes.
CORDELIA: My lord, you have begot me, bred me, loved me: I return those duties back as are right fit. Obey you, love you, and most honor you...
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say they love you all?
LEAR: But goes thy heart with this? So young, and so untender?
CORDELIA: So young, my lord, and true..4
And here, with a daughter who loves him enough to point out the vanity of the whole charade, a petulant Lear doubles down:
Here I disclaim all my paternal care… and as a stranger to my heart and me, hold thee, [Cordelia] from this, for ever...
The barbarous Scythian, or he that makes his generation messes to gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved, as thou my sometime daughter.5
The imagery Lear uses to disown his daughter appalls us—he’s nothing other than the Scythian he describes, a monster who eats his children (‘makes his generation messes’) to gorge his appetite… for praise and flattery.
While the play make a big stir about madness, the sin here is blinding idolatry.
It’s not daughters that Lear loves, as his interaction with Cordelia clearly shows, but rather mascots, mirrors to reflect back an image of himself as a benevolent, loving, and duly loved father. His affection is fragile because he’s misplaced it on himself—and like anyone wildly insecure, he expects and demands everyone else to dance along with it.
Before the scene is over, we know something terrible has happened... and we’re not surprised to find Goneril and Regan, already plotting behind Lear’s back, moving to expand and consolidate the power he’s given them.
Where Lear assumes gratitude and kindness, Shakespeare, shows us only more idols—prestige, power, authority—and a minefield of carefully chosen words and appearances.
Tragic vanity… but not meaningless
As we’ll see in bits in pieces with King David, the true cost of idolatry isn’t the downfall.
Rather, as the scene when an embattled Lear is rescued by Cordelia shows us, it’s missing the chance to give love and affection to what—or rather, who—truly deserves it.
Back from France, Cordelia rescues Lear from the storm-tossed heath, and from Regan and Goneril’s violent hands, (interpreting Gloucester’s decision to usher Lear away from them as treason, Regan tears the Earl’s eyes out).
Exhausted and mentally broken, Lear needs some help recognizing his youngest daughter:
CORDELIA: O, look upon me, sir, and hold your hands in benediction o'er me: No, sir, you must not kneel.
LEAR: Pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish fond old man… For, as I am a man, I think this lady to be my child Cordelia.
CORDELIA: And so I am, I am.
As Leithart points out, the scene when the semi-cognizant Lear recognizes Cordelia spills over with Christian imagery—kneeling, weeping, benediction…
And of all things, forgiveness:
LEAR: I know you do not love me; for your sisters have, as I do remember, done me wrong: You have some cause, they have not.
CORDELIA: No cause, no cause.6
Here, Cordelia is her most Christlike. Even with the horrific wrong committed against her in Act One, her love is steadfast, undiluted. Like God’s love for Israel in Deuteronomy, hers runs circular, sacrificing and enduring everything.
She loves Lear because she loves him.
And with this exchange happening only a few scenes before Cordelia’s pointless death, some find the play far too heavy.
Leithart, among others, can only stomach King Lear by declaring it black comedy an ‘imbecilic’ absurdity set in a meaningless universe.7
With this lens, Cordelia’s death can only be a knife twist, a reminder that Lear, like so many of us, lives haunted by forgiveness, but ultimately doomed to loss and death.
But rather, her horrifying death makes the play.
Again, Shakespeare show us just how meaningful his tragedy is. While he weeps over his daughter’s corpse, Lear’s last words are full of hints.
Even as they nudge us all:
And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,And thou no breath at all?
Thou'lt come no more, never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, look there, look there!
Lear Dies.8
Penitent and grief-stricken, Lear gropes for a reply.
But again, Cordelia’s life and actions only whisper.
She, herself says nothing.
But the prose is fascinating. There’s no flavor of the pretentious declarations we heard in scene one, and certainly no ‘royal we,’ (my poor fool is hang’d). Even the small ‘thank you sir,’ sounds nothing like the towering, self-satisfied icon we first met.
Is Lear a changed man? Melted down by his own sin and being forced to pay the tab?
In both performances I’ve seen—one in Berkeley and another at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—the Lear onstage sure looked like it.
Calling King Lear meaningless might score points, but the words themselves, the sizzling actions and scalding reversals that light still light the stage on five hundred years out, beg to differ.
If King David’s story tells is all about Yahweh, about reminding and showing us who the God of Israel truly is, then King Lear reminds us who could be… if we make the mistake of stacking our deepest loves and loyalties where they clearly don’t belong.
Bonus round—King Lear’s cursology
Over the first three Acts, King Lear has a Captain Haddock-like tendency to lose his cool, lash out, and fling irreverent phrases at whoever’s listening.
Legend has it the Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist who created and illustrated the Tintin books, squared the circle of introducing young readers to an irritable, foul-mouthed sea captain by having Haddock spout nonsense words—Poltroons! Nitwits! Visigoths! Freshwater Swabs!
And who could forget—billions of blistering barnacles!
Lear’s curses are just as colorful, with the added layer of sometimes touching the play’s themes, events, and scenery right on the nose:
“O vassal! Miscreant!”
“Darkness and devils!”
“Life and death!”
“Hysterico Passio!”
“My breath and blood!”
“Vengeance! Plague! Death! Confusion!”
To Goneril: “Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood!”
To Regan and Goneril:
“You unnatural hags! I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall… what they are, yet I know not… but they will be the terrors of the earth!”
And to the weather:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!”
“Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters!”
And on note, we’ll let the Bard drop the mic.
Next month… King David.
Thanks for reading—and if you know of someone who might like a Crocodile, do share!
Second Samuel, 18:33. English Standard Version.
King Lear, Act I, scene ii
King Lear, Act I, scene i
King Lear, Act I, scene i
King Lear, Act I, scene i
King Lear, Act IV, scene vii
Leithart, Peter. “Chapter Six: Deep Comedy.” Deep Comedy, (123).
King Lear, Act V, scene iii