ABSTRACT
There has been a remark that all the persons in King Lear are either very good or very bad. This is an overstatement, yet one which suggests a profound truth. This chapter illuminates many human and natural qualities in the Lear universe and tends to reveal its implicit philosophy. King Lear is a tragic vision of humanity, in its complexity, its interplay of purpose, its travailing evolution. The play is a microcosm of the human race—strange as that word ‘microcosm’ sounds for the vastness, the width and depth, the vague vistas which this play reveals. The chapter analyses certain strata in the play’s thought, thus making more clear the quality of the mysterious presence enveloping the action. The naturalism of King Lear is agnostic and sombre often, and often beautiful. Human life is shown as a painful, slow struggle, in which man travails to be born from animal-nature into his destined inheritance of human nature and supreme love.
