Pride Feelings and emotions play a great role in the life of people. They add color to everyday routine, save our life from being stale and monotonous, liven up communication and relationships between people. But sometimes feelings affect our lives so drastically that they can lead to irrevocably tragic or negative consequences. Pride is one of the feelings that greatly affects and to some extent even endangers good personal relationships and a persons state of mind, just as it happened to such famous characters of the English literature as King Lear, Malvolio and Doctor Faustus. King Lear was a wise and successful ruler who nevertheless fell prey to his unsurpassable feeling of pride. He was enormously proud of his accomplishments and of love and respect of his children and demanded from them to verbally express their love and devotion to him.
And when his favorite daughter Cordelia, who had a personal sense of dignity and valued true feelings more than beautiful words, failed to do that, King Lears pride became wounded and he, despite his deep affection to Cordelia, expelled her and gave all the power in the hands of vicious and hypocritical older daughters, thus sentencing himself to sufferings and vagrancy. When he found himself wandering half-witted in the heath, he cursed his unfaithful older daughters, but the idea that his present state was his own fault originating from his excessive feeling of pride never came to his mind. Only closer to the end of the play King Lear, being greatly influenced and purified by the nature, did learn his bitter lesson. He eventually was saved by Cordelia and reunited and reconciled with his favorite daughter, enjoying her sincere, deep and tender devotion. Malvolio, a humble and devoted servant in the play Twelfth Night, turned out to be a very complicated character. At first he behaved as a strict puritan who valued order most of all and prevented young people from behaving improperly. But as the plot of the play developed the reader realized that Malvolio is a very dangerous man, as his unbounded pride and ambitions spoiled the life of others.
The Essay on The play of King Lear
How far do you agree that “The play of King Lear presents us with a bleak and cruel world and offers us no comfort at the end Much of Shakespeare’s King Lear follows themes such as betrayal on the part of the antagonists and the protagonist’s blindness of the events which have befallen them. For example in a rage with Kent Lear exclaims ‘Out of my sight! ’ with Kent’s retort simply being ‘See ...
He mocked Festes intelligence showing his alleged superiority, his superciliousness awoke in his mind even the idea of marrying Olivia and becoming a noble man. He was also very hypocritical when he reported on the so-called misbehavior of Sir Toby, thus inducing his justified revenge. When Malvolio found Olivias letter, which had been in reality forged by Maria, his feeling of pride and excessive ambitions superseded his common sense. He looked ridiculous in the scene when he tried to please Olivia by his stunning looks. But soon he was taught a good lesson for his unjustified pride, though he never seemed to realize his outrageous behavior. On the contrary, he harbored rage and resentment for his insulters and promised to take revenge on all of them.
Doctor Faustus is one of the most multifaceted and contradictory characters of the world literature. He was an outstanding German scholar who possessed great knowledge and wealth, but who at the same time was never content with what he had. His ambitions and pride made him take an irrevocable step and trade his soul to Lucifer for supernatural unearthly powers. But when Faustus got the universal knowledge, that knowledge brought him no joy, as it opened him God, whom he had betrayed. And when he received all the powers, his desire to do great things vanished and he wasted his life by entertaining himself and performing small magic tricks. In the course of the whole play Doctor Faustus hesitated and doubted the soundness of his agreement with Lucifer, being on the verge of repenting, but his pride never let him do so.
The Essay on Dr. Faustus and the Struggle of Science Vs the Supernatural
It is very interesting to look at the irony of Dr. Faustus and his reliance on the mix of science and the supernatural in the work titled Dr. Faustus. The Webster's New Collegiate defines a scientist as: One learned in science or Natural science; also, known as a scientific investigator. The Dr. Faustus described in Marlow's work definitely fits all of these criteria. He was very learned (or so he ...
Only at the end of the play Faustus anticipating his imminent doom realized his gross mistake, but it was too late. So, having analyzed the literature characters of King Lear, Malvolio and Doctor Faustus, we can come to a conclusion that the feeling of unbounded pride played a crucial and even devastating role in their fates. It not only discredited them in the face of the people who surrounded them and were important to them, but it also did not let them develop their positive traits of character which could fill their lives with more sense. Sources: Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Signet Classics; (February 6, 2001) Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Washington Square Press; Reprint edition (May 1, 1993) Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night.
Washington Square Press; Reissue edition (October 1, 1993).
