A Comparative Study of Edward Bond’s Lear and William Shakespeare’s King Lear in Regards to the Role of Violence in Edward Bond's Characters from a Psychoanalytical Perspective

This article is a comparative study of William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Edward Bond’s King Lear with an emphasis on the role of violence in the formation of Bond’s works. From the age of drama, society and theatre have experienced different forms and concepts of violence, a human phenomenon that has always found its way into all art forms. This article aims to find out the reasons for the use of violence in contemporary dramatic works. According to behaviorists, everyone’s character is the result of accumulating actions and reactions between, nature and nurture, in other words, a person’s genetic make-up and his/her environmental upbringing. Violence and ethical misconduct take their roots in childhood and reveal themselves during adolescence. Therefore the probable answers to the aforementioned question are examined in this comparative study of King Lear by Shakespeare and King Lear by Edward Bond and bring forth the ideas of psychologists and rhetoricians about violence and art. This article aims to represent the formation of characters on the parts of the second playwright. What draws the attention of the audience in Bond’s works, is his approach to the human being in the 21^st century, who is supposed to cope with several responsibilities of the present day capitalist society, along with keeping his true human characteristics, and secure his soul from several cases of violence around him. In his King Lear, Bond has done a psychological reading of this classic text in order to explore the existing gap of this play for the modern world. A gap which is felt according to the needs of the modern man. In characterizing his protagonists and antagonists in King Lear, Bond has recognized the notion of violence in Shakespeare’s King Lear, but does not realize the reasons behind it. He therefore creates an atmosphere in which several flashbacks have been used to explore the reasons of such violent behaviors in his characters. Therefore, the main objective of this article is finding and classifying the types of violence in modern human societies, and a study of Bond’s characters in his King Lear. Since this work is an adaptation, we should also check Bond’s initiatives in doing so. We know many adaptations in the domain of drama, but adapting a dramatic work from another classical dramatic texts, especially with the fame that Shakespeare’s work entails, definitely requires a critical reason. We believe that there should be a definite strong need on the part of the modern human beings such that another Kind Lear should appear to fulfil their aesthetic and psychological needs. Therefore, this issue has also been addressed in this article along with the main research question of this work. Another important issue is Bond’s approach to this text. We should keep in mind that Bond has approached King Lear’s characters psychologically, since the behavior of Lear’s surrounding people, especially his daughters, do not have any clear psychological reasons. We have shown that Bond has recreated these characters in order to come up with a more transparent people in terms of their inner feelings.