Sam Lien asked Nicole Galland:

In your opinions, how are family relationships portrayed differently in King Lear and Hamlet? Thank you!

Nicole Galland This is a great question, Sam, and there are a lot of ways to approach it, but my immediate reaction is this: all the dysfunctional tendencies in Hamlet's family are sublimated, secretive, repressed; in Lear's family, they don't pull any punches - they just let it all hang out. In Hamlet. Cladius secretly (a) has an affair with his sister-in-law, (b) murders his brother, (c) plots Hamlet's murder, (d) plots Hamlet's murder again, and then (e) just for good measure, has a back-up murder plan. Hamlet, in his turn, secretly (a) plots Claudius's death, (b) plots Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's death, (c) plots Claudius' death and (d) talks to himself in private a lot.

King Lear, in comparison, is filled with more open, overt rage, disgust, plotting, double-crossing, croneyism and betrayal than you'd expect from the average British family.

Of course on the other hand, each play features a secondary family, which is somewhat the inverse of the royal brood: Pollonius, although hiding behind an arras, is otherwise an open book, and his children even more so; while Gloucester, in Lear, has two sons who keep secrets from him, even as he secretly assists Lear to safety from his raging-bitch daughters.

So, it all evens out. Sort of.

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