In the play King Lear, Shakespeare had used a lot of animal imageries. This type of figure of speech is to compare Goneril, Regan and other characters with the negative qualities of animals. All these imageries are used to show that human are greed for power as well as other bad qualities such as being ungrateful or disobedient to others. Bird imagery consists a great deal in this play and one of them is cuckoo. This type of bird is used to refer to ungrateful children because they laying their eggs in the nests of other bird. This parasitic cuckoo’s egg hatches earlier than the host’s and the cuckoo chick grows faster and sometimes in most cases the chick forces the young of the host species to leave the nest. The mother still feeds the cuckoo chick as if it were her own. In my opinion, cuckoo totally shows the truly image of ungrateful children because we can see nowadays that there are many cases that children disown their parent by sending them to the foster house and even worse did not taking care of them at all. Goneril and Regan really go well with this imagery as they treat their father, Lear cruelly after get a hold of shares of his kingdom.
Other animal imagery in this play is kite, a bird prey which feeds on small land animals, fish, garbage and carrion. In Act I, Scene IV, we can see this line as King Lear speak to Goneril,
"Detested kite! thou liest." (line261).
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It is obvious that William Shakespeare likes to use animal imageries in King Lear. Animal imageries brings connotation that tells you more about the characteristic of the character. As I read this play, the use of animal such as the kite shows images of ungrateful children. Shakespeare gives Goneril and Regan the images of this horrible creature to show to the reader that they are the antagonist of the play.
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