ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's King Lear engages with 'materialism', that it contains, in Richard Halpern's words, 'an embedded set of more-or-less "materialist" discourses', has been noted by many critics, who have tended to read this materialism either in Marxist terms. In King Lear, Shakespeare responds to a growing realization that the structures developed by existing systems of thought to explain the invisible and counter-intuitive workings of matter no longer worked. The author believe that cognitive science offers some tools for thinking about the ways in which the material world is depicted in King Lear, and about the relationship between the images contained in the play and the scientific speculations contained in contemporary treatises. In King Lear, images of divisibility, weight and smell can help people trace Shakespeare's problematic physics of existence. In King Lear, Shakespeare does more than simply repeat these commonplace metaphors, although their relevance to Lear and his dilemma is clear.
