“All reasonable beings naturally love justice,” observes Samuel Johnson, yet in King Lear, the playwright notoriously allows “the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause.” The shock of this event, central to experience of the play through the centuries, is only heightened if we observe that, in Shakespeare’s sources, the story follows less troubling lines, satisfying conventional expectations of poetic justice. So why does Shakespeare so conspicuously flout what Johnson calls “the natural ideas of justice” that the play’s characters and its audiences long to see upheld?
On the other hand, what is meant in the first place by “natural ideas” with reference to King Lear? How do certain ideas or types of behaviour come to seem natural or unnatural to a given society? What does the play itself do (or what do its interpreters do) either to uphold or to disrupt particular notions of ‘naturalness’ — and whose interests does any given idea about what is ‘natural’ serve?
Our main occupation in these classes will be looking in detail at the complex ways in which the themes of nature and justice are handled in King Lear. Along the way, we will touch on some ideas about nature and justice that were current in Shakespeare’s time, as well as on some of those that have been expressed in key works of Shakespeare criticism through the centuries.
Learning outcomes
- To gain a greater critical understanding of the themes of nature and justice in King Lear, and of the way those themes have figured in the history of the play’s interpretation in criticism and in production;
- To develop an appreciation of relevant ideas about ‘natural justice’ and its relation to other types of justice (e.g. supernatural, poetic, social);
- To be able to discuss the reading in class and to contribute usefully to general debate about the issues of the course.
