ABSTRACT
In King Lear common Renaissance assumptions about honour serve to identify the nature of Lear's early delusions, his anguish, and his moral regeneration. Lear's expectations of love from Cordelia, obedience from Kent, and gratitude from Goneril and Regan are made perverse by the play, but they are for Lear absolute, precisely because he considers those qualities to be inevitable manifestations of nature's universal laws. A pattern of ideas strikingly similar to that in King Lear informs Fulke Greville's Alaham, and though the scenes of the play are developed with Greville's customary and intriguing obscurity, reference to its Choruses, which draw with broad strokes many of the same judgments of honour and other 'human forts' that Shakespeare dramatizes, provides a sort of ethical blueprint of the more complex world of King Lear. The unaccommodated man becomes, to Lear's madness, a 'learned Theban', a 'Noble philosopher', and an 'Athenian'.
