Sample Essay on King Lear

English 102 Honors Section   Sample Essay on Theme     Dr. Van Slyck/Spring 2013

Nature in King Lear: Friend or Foe?

            The word “nature” appears in almost every scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear.  In Act I almost every character refers to “nature,” usually invoking this concept as something positive, though, ironically, each character uses the idea of nature in a way that contradicts the true or “natural” meaning of “nature.”  Shakespeare, therefore, wants his audience to think about the use and misuse of the idea of nature, and he links his own vision of tragedy to the misunderstanding of nature in the play.  By the end of King Lear, however, all of the characters, especially Lear, come to a new understanding of the true, or most positive, meaning of nature, nature that is capable of forgiveness and of love.

            In Act I, Scene I, Lear invokes nature in demanding that his daughters tell him who “doth love us most” saying he will extend his largest bounty “where nature doth with merit challenge” (1.1. 52-53).  Thus he links what is natural to something that is commercial: he will “pay” the daughter who best describes her love.  Throughout this scene he speaks the language of money, language that is, in fact, at odds with nature.  To Cordelia, he says “What can you say to draw/ A third more opulent than your sisters?” (1.1.84-85).

            Immediately following his third daughter’s refusal to describe her love so as to receive her fortune, a chaotic nature seems to burst forth through Lear’s rage, foreshadowing the storm which will ensue and threaten to destroy the entire kingdom, and revealing the wild and monstrous side of nature when it is uncontrolled by human reason, compassion, love.

            Act I, Scene II opens with Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son, invoking nature as his “goddess.”  Edmund’s purpose is to take the idea of nature and make it conform to his need to be legitimate, even as he dismisses the idea of legitimacy.  Gloucester’s illegitimate son defines nature as something that can be molded to his own private purpose.  The main difference between Edmund’s and Lear’s faulty reasoning about nature is that Edmund’s purpose is deliberately evil: he seeks to displace Edgar, the legitimate son, and punish his father for the latter’s condescending treatment of him as a bastard.  Edmund’s idea of nature is, therefore, part of the wild, uncontrolled nature that has been unleashed in the opening of the play by Lear: he seeks to destroy his family for personal gain.  We see that he is successful when Gloucester, after reading the false letter from Edgar, is convinced of his legitimate son’s treachery.  He immediately refers to Edgar as an “unnatural, detested, brutish villain” (I.2.73). Edmund, for his part, has nothing but contempt for his brother Edgar’s naivete, almost gleefully observing that Edgar’s nature is so far from doing harms/That he suspects none” (1.2.168-9). 

            While the word “nature” is not directly used in the rest of Act I, the unnatural state of affairs is commented on extensively, and most effectively, by the Fool who tells Lear how foolish he is for having made his daughters his mothers: “. . .thou gavest them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches. . .” (1.4.155-6).  Even more important, the Fool suggests that if you give your titles away, you will find yourself not only without a home but without an identity: “Now thou art an O without a figure. . .Thou art nothing” (1.4.174-5).  Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that if you give all of your status and possessions away, you will perhaps enter a more “natural” condition but this is a very dangerous state.  Everything that happens in Act I and the commentary on the new state of affairs, especially on the part of the Fool, prepares us to witness a new Lear, a Lear who will be stripped to nothing.  He becomes what he calls Edgar in the storm scene: “unaccommodated man. . .a poor bare forked animal”  (3.4.99).

            Yet, ironically, this unaccommodated man will bring forth a new Lear, one who is finally in touch with the better part of his own nature.  In the final scenes of the play we witness a Lear who may be a broken piece of nature.  Gloucester, when he meets Lear on the road to Dover, calls him a “ruined piece of nature” (4.6.126).  When Cordelia sees him for the first time since his rejection of her she says, “O you kind gods,/Cure this great breach in his abused nature” (4.7.12-13).  In what is perhaps one of the most beautiful speeches in the play, Lear kneels before Cordelia and admits his confusion, his foolishness:

Pray, do not mock me.

I am a very foolish fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less.

And to deal plainly

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you and know this man.

Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is, and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments. Nor I know not

Where I did lodge last night.  Do not laugh at me,

For as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.  4.7.58-68

It is as if Lear has been stripped to his essential nature, and we find that there is goodness and humility in this man who once seemed a raging monster.  He tells Cordelia, “If you have poison for me, I will drink it./I know you do not love me, for your sisters/Have, as I do remember, done me wrong./You have some cause; they have not” (4.7.70-74).  Lear’s complete reversal in this scene, his humble recognition that he has wronged Cordelia, brings out a new understanding of “nature” for Lear, for Cordelia, and for the play’s audience.  The best parts of our nature are not those that allow us chaotic, stormy madness that Lear himself embodies in Act I, Scene I or malevolent, manipulativeness, as evinced by Edmund who calls on nature to help him with his evil ambition.  Good “nature” in Shakespeare’s world is that which is capable of love.  When Lear tells Cordelia she has cause to hate him, she answers in the spirit of this love: “No cause, no cause” (4.7.75).  When Gloucester learns that his loyal son, Edgar has been his true guide, "his flawed heart. . . /Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/Burst smilingly" (5.3.202-204).  Even Edmund, as he is dying, wishes to do "some good. . . despite his own nature" (5.3.252).  Thus the ending of King Lear, despite the death of Cordelia and then Lear, focuses entirely on the spirit of loving redemption and forgiveness.