Connection: King Lear and Cinderella

As I was sitting in my parent's car, driving home from the hawk's game, I was thinking about what I could connect King Lear to. As I was thinking, Goneril and Reagan came into my mind. There are both pretty distinctive characters, and almost immediately I began to think of the evil step-sisters in Cinderella. While there is not a absolute connection between the four, there are definite parallels to be made. In both Cinderella and King Lear the sisters are pretty mean. They also lie to get what they want, and the other sister gets left out in the dust. Cordelia got taken out of the will, and Cinderella almost didn't get to go to the ball. But in the end, Cinderella did come out on top. Whether it will happen in King Lear, I'm not sure, as it's definitely not a fairy-tale. It's interesting to see how Shakespeare's characters influenced a classic fairy tale that has been told over and over again. In the evil stepsisters and Reagan and Goneril we can kind of see an archetype that has been fairly pervasive through the ages.

3 comments:

Mitch said...

If only there were a role from the step mother. How do the husbands/Edmund fit into the metaphor? Are the motivations of the two sets of characters in fact the same?
This seems awfully incomplete, but I do like the basis of siblings teaming up to take advantage of the sibling on the outside.

Anonymous said...

Cinderella has been around long before Shakespeare. Look up Rhodopis, the Greek tale of Cinderella, and the story of Cordelia in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (1136). Shakespeare was hardly an original!

Anonymous said...

I was just looking at my study notes, and thought the exact same thing. there might be something to this..