gonerill and Megan

• Goneril and Regan


  • Threatening
  • Autocratic
  • Cold
  • Ambitious
• Their shared character traits

  Lead to their downfall
• It is easy to think of them as instruments of the plot; not so much ungrateful persons as personifications of ingratitude
• Gloucester: 'His daughters seek his death'
• What Goneril and Regan do to Lear


  1. Turn their father out in to the storm

  2. Pluck out Gloucester's eyes
• Animal imagery used to describe Goneril and Regan

  • Goneril is "wolvish"
  • Her tongue is "serpent-like"
  • Lear sees them as "pelican daughters" who cruelly feed on his flesh
• Lear's view of his daughters

  A 'disease that's in my flesh' - they have wounded Lear and now eat away at his flesh
• Their filial ingratitude might seem to secure some sisterly attachment between them. To show that the same principle which unites them against their father will also divide them against each other
• There is so much sameness of temper and behaviour in them that we find it somewhat difficult to distinguish them as individuals; their characteristic traits being fused and run together in the heat of a common malice
• In Edmund, they find a character wicked enough, and energetic enough in his wickedness, to interest their feelings. It is noteworthy that their passion for him proceeds mainly upon his treachery to his father, as though from such similarity of action they inferred a congeniality of mind
• Goneril and Regan


  • They both lust after Edmund in a predatory and unfeminine way
  • They would have been seen as breaking free from passive female roles and turning to masculine aggressiveness, shocking to a Jacobean audience
• An audience's dislike of Goneril and Regan is primarily created by their lust for power. However, in a male character this trait may not be so distasteful
• Libido Sentlendi


  The animal-like appetite for sensation that define the driving forces of man's depravity, which rules especially in Goneril and Regan
• In act 1 scene 1 we may temporarily sympathise with them as they are not Lear's favourite and they clearly have been told so
• They knew Cordelia was his favourite, so could we justify their actions? Perhaps they felt underappreciated or unloved which caused them to turn sour. It does not condone their actions but may give some insight into why they turn away their father. Maybe they felt that he did not love and care for them when they were younger so why should they care for him now in his old age. Additionally their actions may be justified when we find that their mother is not present and thus they could have suffered maternal depravation as children, something which Bowlby concluded would lead them to make excessive demands as adults
• They cover up their depravity with attractive exteriors
• Their words are empty with all they say during the love
• The bloodlust seen by Goneril, Regan and Cornwall is an abhorrent kind of madness
• The Fool: 'Lear has "banished 2 daughters"'
• The sisters are completely unmoved by Lear's show of passion and emotion, they're completely cold
• We see the sisters cutting of Lear when he speaks
• Wooden stools represent the sisters during Lear's mock trial and the wood is described as "warped", showing that the sisters have an unnatural, twisted and perverse nature
• Given that love contests in mythology invariably involved the choice of a wife, it is perhaps not fanciful to understand Goneril and Regan as Lear's mistresses, at least on an emotional level, while Cordelia fulfils the role of wife