King Lear and Macbeth

In the opinion of many critics, King Lear and its immediate successor Macbeth are Shakespeare’s most profound tragedies. Both contain studies of murderous ambition and self-consuming evil; both seem to raise the question whether human disorder is mirrored in the natural world; both are concerned with the nature of kingship and authority. In particular, King Lear has been claimed as a Christian drama of redemptive love, but it has also been regarded as an ancestor of the modern existentialist theatre of the ‘absurd’; and in an extension of this view, critics (most forcefully but not exclusively those of a cultural materialist bent) have found in the play a sceptical nihilism underlying the late Renaissance at large. At the same time textual scholarship has raised the question whether in the quarto and folio texts we have two distinct versions, with different emphases and even different significance. Macbeth presents us with a protagonist whose ambition makes him a regicide and a usurper; but whose keen nerves and imagination prevent his enjoyment of the fruits of his crime, and instead lead him to a despairing recognition of his damnation.

It will also be shown how these two plays have a contemporary political dimension, acted as they were by the King’s Company before their patron, James I, and reflecting some of his concerns. King Lear deals with the dismemberment of a kingdom and the nature of royal justice. Acted in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Macbeth centres upon the murder of a king, and includes among its cast James’s ancestors. If Macbeth is obviously the Scottish play for a Scots king, King Lear too would have an immediate interest to a king who himself wrote upon the nature of kingship, and sought the full political union of his two kingdoms