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Themes of the Play

Themes of the Play. Nature. What is natural?. The dominance of the evil characters might lead us to feel that nature is a cruel force in King Lear. Edmund ’ s badness is natural. He calls on nature to provide him with the nature necessary to challenge the status quo.

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Themes of the Play

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  1. Themes of the Play Nature

  2. What is natural? • The dominance of the evil characters might lead us to feel that nature is a cruel force in King Lear. • Edmund’s badness is natural. He calls on nature to provide him with the nature necessary to challenge the status quo. • Cruelty comes naturally to Goneril and Regan. • For these characters there is no natural order; they seek to create their own selfish universe.

  3. ‘unpublished virtues of the earth’ • Cordelia displays the virtues of a good nature (IV.4) • For Kent, the Fool, Edgar and Cordelia it is natural to be loving, trusting and loyal. • This group believe in a natural order, which they struggle to restore. Yet they suffer.

  4. Lear’s unnatural crimes • The king represents the natural order. • At the beginning of the play he presides over a harmonious hierarchy. • Lear transgresses against the natural order when he fails to recognise Cordelia’s worthiness, falsely calling her ‘a wretch whom nature is ashamed/ Almost t’ acknowledges her’ • He compounds the mistake when he gives Goneril and Regan power over him.

  5. Gloucester’s errors • Gloucester disinherits his legitimate heir in favour of the bastard, whom he mistakes for a ‘Loyal and natural boy’. • Lear and Gloucester’s errors are disastrous. • Lear finds that his ‘frame of nature’ has been wrenched ‘From the fixed place’. • This image suggests the seriousness of Lear’s crimes against the natural order. An enormous struggle ensues, as nature tries to reassert herself. The storm can be seen as both punishment and protest.

  6. Act Five-Cordelia’s death • At the close of Act V it is difficult to believe that nature or the natural order has really ‘won’. • Lear suggests that nature is barbaric when he asks, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/And thou no breath at all?’ • Cordelia’s death may be seen as the final punishment for Lear’s transgression against nature. • The natural order is destroyed by the mistakes of a man. When he stoops to folly, the natural order is easily destroyed.

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