How Shakespeare’s King Lear is Still Relevant Today

The story of King Lear is about a king who decides to step down from his throne and evenly divide the kingdom among his daughters. But before that happens he will put them through a test, asking each daughter how much she loves him. Goneril and Regan, Lear’s eldest daughters go first and gives their father a speech on how much they love him, and once they finish Lear feels flattered by what they just said to him. Now, it’s Cordelia’s turn. But Cordelia, Lear’s youngest daughter and favorite daughter amongst them all, remains silent. Lear asks her why she has nothing to say. She answers by saying that she has no words to describe how she feels about her him. Once Lear hears this, he gets angry and immediately disowns her. The King of France, who’s in love with Cordelia asks Lear for her hand and later on Cordelia goes to France without her father's blessing.

The question “Based on at least three specific events and three characters’ actions, how is the play, King Lear still relevant in today’s world?” I believe that this tragic story relates to a lot of things in today’s society. There are many different scenes and actions from the characters that show dilemmas within today’s society. For example, when Goneril and Regan pretended to love their father just so that they could receive his wealth and land. I believe this character action and specific action relates to today’s society because sometimes there are girls that don’t really love their parents for who they are, but for their wealth. In “King Lear” Goneril and Regan exaggerate their love for their father so that they can receive a big portion of land from there father. Once this happens, they get a lot of power and basically start to control their father because of all the power he has lost to them. In today’s society many girls and also boys receive a lot from their parents like money, love, and anything they can dream of, but then later on disown their own parents because they don’t need them anymore. So I believe this specific action in King Lear can relate to today’s society.

The second example of how King Lear is still relevant to today’s society is when in the story after Cordelia stays silent and doesn’t express his love for him. He gets outraged and decided to disown her and basically kick her out the castle. I believe this specific event in the story is relevant to today’s society because some parents are very strict with their children and want to control their kids and everything they do and kids become stressed and don’t know what to do without their parents coming into their life. So since the parents are so strict, that one easily slip up from the child can cause the parent to become angry and outraged with their kid that they make the horrible decision of kicking out their child from the house. This happens a lot in today’s society where parents decide to kick their kids from their one and only home because of a easy slip up or mistake they made that could have easily been solved or been talked out but sometimes the anger takes over.

A third and final example I have of how King Lear is still relevant in today’s society is the fact that Lear is aging really quickly and starting to quickly have mental disorders and once this happens, his two daughters that he has given land and power to don’t pay attention to him because they don’t want to deal with his craziness. For example, when he wanted to have 100 knights around him at all times, his daughters thought that this was an outrageous idea because they thought that what was the point of having so many knights, if they have enough protection on their lands. They didn’t understand where Lear was coming from with this idea. In today’s society I believe this happens a lot. Parents age quickly, development mental disorders, or sometimes kids simply don’t want to look after their parents anymore because they don’t want the responsibility of taking care of them and don’t have the patience also. Once they feel like this, they leave their parents in care homes because they don’t want that extra responsibility of taking care of their parents. This happens a lot in today’s society and that’s why we see a lot of care homes filled with elderly people because their kids just don’t want to deal with them anymore and this is what happened in King Lear, with Lear and his two eldest daughters.

In conclusion, the story of “King Lear” is still relevant in today’s society even though it was written so long ago. It presents many themes that are present today. I believe that King Lear will be an everlasting story filled with so many themes that, there will always be at least one thing that applies to that certain time period in the future.