The use of foil characters in the play King Lear

In King Lear the use of foil characters is apparent throughout and is a tool that Shakespeare uses to his advantage often. A foil character is a character that defines another character by contrast.for a character to be a foil of another character they must have similarities but some notable differences . So now when you look at king Lear there's an endless flow of perfect examples of foil characters and very effective ones at that. The most prominent foils in this play would have to be that of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia , Lear and Edgar, Edgar and Edmund and perhaps even Kent and then more minor character in Oswald. In each of these pairings there is a good and bad side almost like a fairy tale and this seems to be a common factor when it comes to foil characters. In fairy tales the foil characterisation is used to demonstrate right and wrong or tell the stories moral lesson and I think that this is quite relevant in the foiling used in King Lear by Shakespeare.

To firstly look at the foil character and Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. This relationship is shown in the first seen when we see Lear as his three daughters to tell him how much they love him. Goneril and Regan are all to ready to profess they're love opening and very fully but with quite a falseness in the way it is said. When It comes to young Cordelia's turn she simply says 'nothing' but with more love than either if the other two showed. Theses are perfect foils because they have so many things in common and so many reasons to be the same yet they are so different and opposite. By Goneril and Regan being so evil they only serve to show how pure and good Cordelia is and this is a great way to show this through launguage as we can't see these characters we can only read them and so this use of foiling gives us a better idea or understanding of these characters from the outset and warn us what to expect of them.

Secondly looking at the foil characters of Lear and Edgar. In my opinion these are the most important and most relevant foil characters in the play. They are used as foils to highlight the motif of madness but is very prominent aspect in tis play. We see these characters during the storm scenes and this is when Shakespeare really using the foil characters to their maximum. In Lear we see and old man who is suffering from what looks like a mental disorder were he is losing his mind slightly and going 'mad' as they say and in Edgar we see a full aware man pretend to be mad as he is in disguise. In this moment Edgar is acting as 'Poor Tom' with the fake mad persona he has taken on to protect himself from banishment or worse which were the punishments at the time of this play. These characters have both lost they're families and the luxurious lives the once knew very suddenly. We see Edgar enduring mental and physical pain out of fear and to protect himself and in contrast to this  false we see the true madness we see the true madness developing in Lear who with his old age is losing his sense. In this moment we see these foil yet comparable characters come into contact and make a connection to effective develop as characters. This is a very clever way for Lear to use this madness and to connect the two storyline that have been developing between the two families- Lear's family and Gloucester's family.

In King Lear the foil character is there to make the main characters look better and to show of the characteristics of the main characters and allows you to see traits you might not have seen otherwise foil characters turn a very normal character into a more interesting character by simply being more boring that the that character. In this play we can clearly see Goneril and Regan's self centred violent stature shows how peaceful and unselfish Cordelia is, we see how Edgar's false madness shows how real Lear's madness is, we how Edmund's evilness and egoistic nature serves to highlight Edgar's kind and loyal nature and we also see how Oswald's controversial and malicious tendancies show how benevolent and kind Kent is. Without the use of these foil characters the characters in this play would be quite ordinary and plain but Shakespeare creates well developed characters both physically and mentally by his use of foil characters.