by Janet Grischy

Created on: September 01, 2010

Nature is not cruel in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. It is indifferent, implacable, and cold. Some people may be cold, but what warmth there is to be had in life people create among themselves, in a small way, sheltering from a heartless universe in each other’s company. People may try to personify nature, calling it God or giving it one of the goddesses’ names, but nature feels nothing.

At the end of Act II, Lear quarrels with his undutiful daughters about his retinue, and the dignities they deny him. “O fool, I shall go mad!” he says, and steps out into the storm. They shut up the castle doors behind him. He walks out into the storm, and throws himself into the void of uncaring nature.

In Act III he howls within the storm. It echoes the chaos in his mind, compounded as his reason fails. He encourages the storm at first, as if it were his own anger, raging at the family that has stolen his dignity, after he freely gave them his power. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” Yet ultimately he is broken by the massed forces symbolized by the storm.

The forces of nature overwhelm the merely human actors swept up in them, as age and senility overtake the great king, a conqueror in his day, and as disorder overwhelms his creation, the great kingdom that he built and in his dotage broke in two.

A personified nature might be angry with Lear for shirking his duty. If the work of his youth was the unification of Britain, then surely the work of his maturity should have been the welfare of its citizens. He sees this, recognizing in himself the plight of the scorned. “Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.”

Justice is a virtue humans create; it is not a force of nature, to William Shakespeare. Lear has not created a just society, as a king ought to do. Instead, he has resigned, thrusting his country into the hands of grasping, inadequate, venal queens. Still, unreasonably, he demands the dignity of high office without its duties.

Nature is impersonal though, and does not judge him. It is a force without aim or character. It surrounds the actors, and buffets them, like the broad circumstances that trap them. People, conversely, create societies and hierarchies in which to know their place or change it, to strive to rise, to fall through error, bad luck, or time’s erosion, but to belong.

Society structures and gives moral meaning to each act of any person. Without society, mindless nature is mere chaos, like the storm. When Lear meets with Gloucester, who like himself has been betrayed by a child, the pair takes comfort in their quiet society. Then, when Lear is reunited with Cordelia, though as a prisoner, he is delighted, “We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage...”

Freed, restored to his position, King Lear is without moral force, having renounced his part in the history of Britain. He is humble, knowing human life has bypassed him in his solitary madness. “I have seen the day with my good biting falchion [sword] I would have made them skip. I am old now, And these same crosses [misfortunes] spoil me.”

He is no longer mad perhaps; he has returned to society. Yet he is no longer a true king, though his friends give him his title back. He dies broken, but no longer alone.

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