King Lear Suffering

Nevertheless the end of King Lear frustrates the stoic followers. Is it an injustice end that reveals the cruelty and absolute nonsense of the world; or a tragedy of human not regulating their behavior and affection? Characters represent the battle of these different perspectives. For Kent, Lear must follow stoic principles to become calm and wise to reach the truth, that is, to live in the world peacefully; Lear, on the other hand, follows his instinct to the extent of madness. He understands the truth better than Kent if we see the play with hindsight; the Fool makes Lear mad, but it is because his insight is truer than Kent: thou art nothing. What is Lear, then? A body named Lear. Jonathan Bate argues that Shakespeare is in fact anti-stoic; Shakespeare likely had read the Epicurean, who praises the sensuality, and applied it to plays to contrast the stoicism (417). In King Lear, the term epicurean actually appears when Goneril scolds Lear for his discourteousness (I. iv. 225). Again,
Suffering, in Greek, also means passivity (Staehler 63). The suffering is not merely pain, but the fact that we cannot escape from our body. Passivity as suffering means in this sense: human is vulnerable, and the vulnerability directly shows itself though the body. The inescapability of our body is our suffering. When Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out, we feel the unthinkable horror – but not because the scene is caused by some pure devils, or it represents tragic flaw of human essence – the horror purely originates from the direct violence on the body. When Samuel Johnson says he cannot bear to read the scene of King Lear, it is because the mise-en-scène of the scene does not mitigate the violence, but puts audience face to face with the violence; the scene of Gloucester’s eyes plucked out cannot be experienced as a metaphor of abstract tragedy, it is the tragedy of human body, the violence rendering on Gloucester’s