This Month's King Lear Feature >>

Since it was first staged and published in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare's King Lear has been the subject of extensive literary interpretation and the object of intense critical debate. The key issue here is whether King Lear is a classical tragedy with a redemptive moral or a radical departure from genre conventions, a play with a profoundly pessimistic, even nihilistic, view of man and the world he briefly inhabits. At the center of the division between the traditional and the modern readings of Shakespeare's Lear is the subject and theme of nature, human and universal, and the question of whether there is a moral order to be discerned within its workings. The traditional view of King Lear points to an array of unnatural forces, most notably Lear's premature abdication of his throne and his rejection of Cordelia's qualified love, as temporarily overturning the moral mechanisms of nature. This view of King Lear ascribes a regenerative function to nature, one that imparts a tragic nobility to the play's final outcome. On the other hand, many modern literary critics see unbridled and chaotic nature as the central force behind Lear's fall with the overwhelming power of a brutish cosmos crushing Lear into a pathetic madman pointlessly crying out in a world without hope for redemption.