KING LEAR (1605 /1606)
Throughout Station Eleven, Mandel makes allusions to William Shakespeare’s tragic play King Lear. This motif, when it appears, reinforces the novel’s exploration of the effects of hindsight and the ways in which power changes people.
In the original play, the aging King Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters. He’s deceived by the false flattery of his oldest children Regan and Goneril, and he banishes his innocent youngest daughter, Cordelia, because he sees her refusal to exaggerate her love for him as disloyal. This unpopular decision leads to betrayal and political chaos. It’s also the direct cause of Lear’s descent into madness, as he realizes too late that Cordelia was the only person who truly loved him.
By the play’s end, nearly every major character has died, and the few who remain have to rebuild their world from the ground up. One of the most explicit connections between the book and the play is Arthur’s role as King Lear, which he is acting in on the night of his death. This is where the novel begins, and the narrative regularly revisits in flashbacks. Arthur’s sudden collapse onstage foreshadows the larger collapse of civilization that follows the Georgia Flu outbreak. The chaotic transition from performance to reality in the flashbacks to that night—the audience is unsure if Arthur is still acting until the paramedics arrive—also reflects the thin boundary between order and chaos. The collapse of civilization also echoes the chaos that Lear’s actions cause, which eventually drives him to madness.
In King Lear and in Station Eleven, after things collapse the world becomes unpredictable and dangerous. Just as Lear descends toward insanity after his daughters’ betrayals, the world of Station Eleven falls into disorder after the pandemic erupts. Also like Lear, characters in Station Eleven are forced to think about the impact of their actions and to agonize over what they might have done differently. Just as Lear only understands his mistakes when it is too late to fix them, characters like Kirsten (in the present) and Arthur (in the past) try to piece together the meaning of past events.
The shifting dynamics of leadership in Station Eleven similarly parallel the struggles for control in Lear. Some leaders, like the Prophet, take advantage of people’s fear and confusion to manipulate them into following their ideologies. The Prophet wields his power through fear and violence, convincing people they have a moral imperative to follow him. The Traveling Symphony, by contrast, operates on loyalty and the shared purpose of bringing beauty to the world. The Prophet’s version of authority only works as long as he is able to inspire fear and obedience, while the Symphony’s power is able to persist despite all the danger and challenges they face. Station Eleven Literary Devices | LitCharts
RELEVANCE TO STATION ELEVEN
Its inclusion in the novel Station Eleven as the play that Arthur dies performing is especially significant, as Lear is a character who deals with intense amounts of regret.
Station Eleven King Lear | GradeSaver
Throughout the novel, King Lear sheds light on the characters and serves as a lens through which to understand Arthur and Kirsten. Like the titular King Lear, Arthur is a powerful man filled with regret who faces the end. He’s not just at the end of his life but at the end of the era in which he was deemed significant. Meanwhile Shakespeare’s Lear wanders around his own world self-absorbed, misguided, and failing to see the love available to him in his waning moments. In the same way, Arthur spends his time on earth driven by ego. He neglects his son and betrays the people he loves. Both Lear and Arthur die in a state of confusion. Lear is unable to accept that his daughter is dead, and Arthur keeps reciting his lines as Lear while he dies on stage. Like Cordelia, Kirsten sees the world with clarity in the midst of other people’s insanity. She is kind but also willing to take violent action to protect herself and those she loves. As in King Lear, almost everyone within the world of Station Eleven dies, and those left standing struggle to find meaning in the midst of such vast, incomprehensible loss. Station Eleven: Motifs | SparkNotes
The Setup: Love and Law in Athens
The play opens in Athens, where Duke Theseus is preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta. However, the human drama is intense: Egeus brings his daughter, Hermia, to the court, demanding she marry Demetrius. Hermia refuses because she is in love with Lysander. Theseus gives her a harsh ultimatum: marry Demetrius, face execution, or become a nun.
Hermia and Lysander plot to escape the city and elope in the woods the following night. They share this plan with Helena, who is madly in love with Demetrius, even though he abandoned her for Hermia. Seeking to win back his favor, Helena tells Demetrius about the secret elopement.
Chaos in the Woods
All four lovers enter the forest, which is ruled by the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania. The fairy monarchs are fighting over a "changeling boy," and to take revenge on his wife, Oberon commands his mischievous servant, Puck, to find a magical flower. The juice of this flower, when placed on a sleeping person's eyes, makes them fall in love with the first living thing they see upon waking.
Oberon plans to use this on Titania, but also decides to help Helena by having Puck use it on Demetrius.
The Misfire:
Puck finds sleeping humans but makes a critical error, confusing Lysander for Demetrius. He puts the potion on Lysander’s eyes. When Lysander wakes, he sees Helena and instantly falls in love with her, abandoning a sleeping Hermia.
Meanwhile, a group of bumbling amateur actors (the "mechanicals") are rehearsing nearby. Puck decides to play a trick on them, transforming the head of their lead actor, Nick Bottom, into that of a donkey. The terrified actors flee, and when Titania wakes, she sees the donkey-headed Bottom and instantly falls in love with him.
Resolution and Happy Endings
As the night progresses, pandemonium breaks out. Both Lysander and Demetrius (after Oberon finally fixes Puck's mistake) are in love with Helena, who believes they are mocking her. Hermia is left confused and furious, causing a fight between the women.
Realizing the chaos, Oberon commands Puck to fix the lovers' affections and remove the spell from Titania. Titania is reconciled with Oberon, and the donkey head is removed from Bottom.
The next morning, Theseus and Hippolyta find the lovers in the forest, now all perfectly paired: Hermia with Lysander, and Helena with Demetrius. Theseus overrides Egeus and permits the couples to marry. The play ends with a hilarious, disastrous performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe" by the craftsmen at the wedding feast. In the end, Puck delivers a final monologue to the audience, suggesting that if the play seemed ridiculous, they should simply think of it as a dream.
CONNECTING THEMES TO STATION ELEVEN
NATURAL WORLD IN CHAOS
Shakespeare poses the idea that the entire natural world is in a state of disorder and chaos. Oberon and Titania's ongoing quarrels have, it is stated, upset the natural world so much so that the seasons have become inverted and environmental damage is underway.
A LIMINAL SPACE & TRANSITIONS
Liminal literally means ‘threshold’, and refers to the space between, the area of transition from one thing to another. The play takes people out of the built, structured world where rules are known, and into a ‘no-man’s-land.’ The Athenians have left the orderly world of the city for an unruly space ungoverned by any familiar laws. Court/forest, day/night, waking/sleeping, love/pain – most of the characters spend the play unsure of what space they are occupying between many opposite states.
DREAMS
Dreams play a significant role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Shakespeare explores the blurring of reality and dreams throughout the play. Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams and how time loses its normal sense of flow and the impossible occurs as a matter of course. At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream. Crossing from Athens into the forest seems to blur the line between dreams and reality for every character that crosses the threshold, testing the characters in unfamiliar territories where usual rules of reality don’t apply.
MAGIC, ILLUSION, DECEPTION, TRICKERY
The fairies’ magic brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, and is central to the fantastical atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolised by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Misused, the magic causes chaos, but it ultimately resolves the play’s tensions by restoring love to balance among the four Athenian youths.