The Sin of Pride Exposed in King Lear and The Duchess of MalfiIn this short monograph, we will hunt down and examine various creatures from the bestiary of Medieval Thought /renaissance. Among these are the ferocious lion of imperious and selfish power, a pair of fantastic peacocks, one of vanity, one of preening social status, and the docile lamb of humility. The lion and peacocks belong to the species called pride, while the lamb belongs to a completely different, indeed antithetical, race, that of humility and forgiveness. The textual regions we will explore include the diverse expanses, from palace to moor, of William Shakespeare, the dark and sinister Italy of John Webster, and the fragrant ladies' rooms of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick. The tragic hero of Shakespeare's King Lear is brought down, like all tragic heroes, by a fatal flaw, in this case pride, and pride's sister, madness. It is the king's selfish demand for total love and, above all, the protests to this effect from the daughter who loves him most, that prepare the ground for his downfall, as well as harking back to the minds of the Elizabethan audience of Shakespeare's time the above-cited biblical edict. This daughter, Cordelia, can be seen as the humble lamb mentioned earlier, and her love and filial devotion go not only beyond that of her sisters (which is zero) but beyond words, thus infuriating the 'proud king whose subsequent petulant reproaches extend to a bit of ironic Freudian projection: "Let pride, which you call simplicity, marry you" (Ii125). Here Shakespeare emphasizes Lear's pride by having him indulge in the common tendency to despise in others (and in this case wrongly) what one is most guilty of. Lear's reckless pride... half of the paper... in which it was supposedly written for a certain Lady Haughty, a name indicative of no small amount of pride, pardon my lithotes. So, in short, we have captured, examined and tagged our various pride creatures, and the time has come to release them once again, to run wild to the four corners of the earth. Lions will devour everything in their path with arrogant derision; peacocks peck and claw at each other as they jockey for position in their little social circles, all the while pouting and preening, painting feathers on their feathers; and the lambs will continue to be slaughtered in their docility, without ever uttering a word of contempt, so that we can eat lamb chops with mint jelly at Ruth's Chris with our beautiful friends in precisely made up." Pride comes before pride. destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall."Proverbs 16:18