Goneril Sets Her Trap — King Lear

This is a short scene but a revealing one. Goneril and her steward Oswald are alone, and within a dozen lines Goneril has issued instructions that will determine the next phase of the play.

She begins with a complaint: Lear struck one of her gentlemen for scolding his Fool. Oswald confirms it. Goneril treats this as proof of a pattern: "by day and night, he wrongs me; every hour / He flashes into one gross crime or other." The accumulation of grievance is the point. She is not responding to a single incident; she has already made up her mind and is now building a case.

Her instructions to Oswald are precise. When Lear returns from hunting, she will not speak with him, Oswald should say she is sick. Oswald and the other servants should treat Lear and his knights with deliberate coldness: "come slack of former services." She wants friction. She wants Lear to feel the diminishment of his position so sharply that he will leave. "I would breed from hence occasions," she says, she intends to manufacture the very conflict she will then complain about.

The line that cuts deepest is her description of her father: "Idle old man, that still would manage those authorities that he hath given away." There is something accurate in it: Lear did give the power away and still expects to wield it. But the contempt with which she says it removes any pretense of filial concern. She is not frustrated by a difficult situation. She has decided her father is a problem to be managed.

She closes by telling Oswald she will write to Regan immediately, confident her sister's mind and hers are one. The coordinated campaign against their father is already underway; organised, deliberate, and moving fast.