Loyalty, Disobedience, and Trickery in King Lear and Decameron
This essay examines why the Earl of Kent in Shakespeare's King Lear rejects Siro's principle of unconditional obedience, choosing instead to express loyalty through disobedience and disguise. Drawing comparisons with two servant figures in Boccaccio's Decameron (tales 7.8 and 8.4), the paper analyzes what disobedience and trickery achieve for each character and whether those strategies produce better outcomes. While the Decameron's servant women secure financial rewards and their mistresses escape harm, Kent and Edgar in King Lear gain only tragic deaths alongside the masters they faithfully served. The essay ultimately argues that the Decameron servants achieve more tangible results, though Kent and Edgar display a far deeper and nobler form of loyalty.
- Introduction: Obedience Versus Loyal Disobedience: Framing thesis on loyalty, obedience, and disobedience
- The Earl of Kent: Feudal Loyalty and Noble Disguise: Kent's exile, disguise, and death-loyal service
- Edgar and the Earl of Gloucester: Love Returned for Hatred: Edgar's devotion to his unjust father
- Servant Trickery in Decameron 7.8 and 8.4: Maid trickery and rewards in Boccaccio's tales
- Comparing Outcomes: King Lear Versus the Decameron: Tragic deaths versus comic rewards across texts
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What makes this paper effective
- It uses a clear comparative framework, measuring three literary works against a single central question: does loyal disobedience produce better results than obedient service?
- It grounds abstract concepts like loyalty and feudal obligation in specific textual evidence, including direct quotations from both Shakespeare and Boccaccio.
- It draws meaningful social distinctions — aristocratic vassalage versus wage-earning service — that enrich the comparison rather than treating all servant relationships as equivalent.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis across genres (tragedy versus comic novella), using outcome-based reasoning to evaluate competing models of loyalty. By asking which characters fare better and why, it moves beyond plot summary toward genuine interpretive argument.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a framing quotation from Mandragola and a thesis grounded in it. It then profiles Kent and Edgar in King Lear separately, establishing the depth and cost of their loyalty. The next section introduces the Decameron servants as a contrast, emphasizing their lower social status and transactional motivations. The conclusion weighs outcomes across all three texts, finding that the Decameron servants achieve more practical success while King Lear's loyal figures display greater moral virtue at far greater personal cost.
Introduction: Obedience Versus Loyal Disobedience
In Mandragola, the servant Siro declares: "I am your servant, and servants ought never to ask their masters about anything, nor to look into any of their affairs, but when they are told about them by them themselves, they ought to serve them faithfully, so I have done and so I shall do." Siro thus asserts that the primary duty of a loyal servant — and indeed of others who serve, such as vassals, spouses, and children who owe loyalty to masters — is to obey. Some servants and other subordinate figures in Mandragola, the Decameron, and King Lear seem to agree. Others, however, do not. The Earl of Kent in King Lear, for example, expresses his loyalty precisely by disobeying his master and engaging in trickery.
The question worth examining is why Kent rejects Siro's point of view and decides that the best way to remain loyal — first to King Lear, and later to the Duke of Gloucester — is to disobey and to deceive. What do disobedience and trickery achieve? And do they produce better results than the obedient behavior of the servant women in Decameron 7.8 and 8.4?
Both of the women servants in the Decameron experience better outcomes than the characters in King Lear, since most of the latter end up dead by the close of the play. No one dies in the two Boccaccio stories, which were intended to be humorous — although one of the servant women receives a very bad beating. Unlike those servants, who were members of the lower classes and quite literally nameless nobodies, the Earl of Kent was an aristocrat who had always served King Lear totally and without reservation. He was not a hired man but was bound by feudal oaths of loyalty to his sovereign.
References
Boccaccio, G. (1920). Decameron. Cincinnati, OH.
Shakespeare, W. (1998). King Lear. Signet Classics.
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