King Lear: Themes (OCR A Level English Literature): Revision Note

Themes

Having a thorough grasp of the following themes, and crucially, how and why Shakespeare explores these themes, will enable you to produce a conceptualised response in your exam. Linking carefully to the structure of the plot and what we know about the attitudes of the time period will give you access to the very highest marks on the mark scheme.

• Authority and power

• Kingship and the divine right of kings

• Appearance and reality

• Family, loyalty and betrayal

• Justice and suffering

Authority and power

King Lear explores the relationship between authority and responsibility, showing how easily power can collapse once it becomes separated from judgement and genuine loyalty. Shakespeare contrasts those who inherit or seize authority with those who earn respect through their actions, asking whether power alone is enough to make someone a good ruler. 

Knowledge and evidence

• Lear makes his daughters perform their love for him before he divides anything up:

  • By turning affection into a public competition, Lear behaves more like a ruler demanding obedience than a father seeking honesty

  • This shows how used he is to being obeyed, expecting loyalty to work the same way as an order does

• Lear wants to give up the responsibilities of being king while keeping its privileges:

  • This suggests he has become convinced that his authority comes from who he is, rather than from the crown he wears:

    • He is stunned to see his elder daughters no longer obey him once they have no reason to

    • It is this mistake that leaves him broken and abandoned for much of the play

• Once he has given away his power, his authority collapses quickly:

  • Goneril and Regan cut his knights down from a hundred, to fifty, to nothing at all, and openly ask why he needs any of them

• A similar pattern unfolds with Gloucester, on a smaller, more domestic scale:

  • Edmund ends up with his father's title and trust despite having no real claim to either

  • This shows how status in this play can be taken through manipulation as easily as it is given away through misplaced trust

• Edmund's “Nature” speech is his clearest statement that power belongs to whoever is bold enough to take it, not whoever happens to be born into it

• By the resolution, everyone who built power on cruelty or deception ends up destroyed by it: 

  • Goneril, Regan and Edmund all die because of the exact methods they used to get ahead

• Albany and Edgar are left standing, and it is not an accident that they are also the two who never sought power for themselves

What is Shakespeare's intention?

• Shakespeare exposes the vulnerability of status when divorced from actual political power

• Shakespeare critiques the arbitrary and superficial nature of institutional authority:

  • Through Lear's mad dialogue in his exile, the play suggests that authority is often merely a function of "office" rather than moral or personal superiority

• Shakespeare warns of the danger when absolute power is blinded by flattery:

  • The play demonstrates how easily rules can mistake sycophancy for genuine loyalty, leading to a total collapse of judgement

Kingship and the divine right of kings

King Lear explores not only who holds power, but also what makes that power legitimate. Drawing on Jacobean beliefs about kingship, Shakespeare questions whether a monarch can abandon the crown's responsibilities without disrupting both the political and natural order. 

Knowledge and evidence

• Jacobean audiences would likely have understood kingship as divinely ordained, part of a natural hierarchy sometimes called the Great Chain of Being, where every rank of society, and of nature, had a proper place:

  • By that belief system, Lear dividing his kingdom and stepping back is not just a political mistake, it is a disruption of the natural order itself

• This manifests structurally in the storm in Act 3, where nature seems to be rebelling right alongside the collapse of Lear's own authority:

  • The storm is often read as pathetic fallacy, using weather to reflect what is going on inside a character

  • However, it could just as easily be read as literal chaos caused by Lear stepping down in the first place

• Kent's continued loyalty to Lear, even after his banishment, reflects the period's belief that loyalty to a king should be unconditional, whatever that king actually does

What is Shakespeare's intention?

• Shakespeare questions whether authority can survive on birth or title alone, suggesting it must also be supported by judgement, responsibility and genuine loyalty

• He shows how quickly power collapses once it is separated from real loyalty, rather than held up by fear or flattery

• He also raises the question of what happens to a kingdom, and maybe to the natural order itself, once its rightful ruler walks away from their responsibilities

Appearance and reality

In King Lear, Shakespeare repeatedly contrasts how characters present themselves with who they really are, using disguise, treachery, lies and blindness to explore the difference between appearance and reality. The sharper-tongued, most conniving speakers, Goneril, Regan and Edmund, prove the least trustworthy, whilst those who show a weakness, the foolish, the mad, or the physically blind, are frequently shown to perceive the truth more clearly than anyone else in the play.

Knowledge and evidence

• The theme is established immediately through Lear's demand that his daughters declare their love before he divides the kingdom between them: 

  • Goneril and Regan's speeches are deliberately excessive and insincere

  • Cordelia's refusal to compete is honest but costs her everything

• Disguise becomes increasingly important as the plot develops:

  • Kent disguises himself as a servant in order to continue serving Lear after his banishment, concealing his identity precisely in order to remain loyal

  • Edgar disguises himself as the mad beggar Poor Tom, a performance of madness that ironically permits him to voice difficult truths his true identity could never risk uttering

• Shakespeare develops the theme further through actual madness and actual blindness as the play progresses:

  • Lear's descent into madness during the storm strips away his capacity for social performance entirely

  • It is here that he begins to demonstrate genuine insight, reflecting for the first time on the suffering of the poor

  • Gloucester's physical blinding in Act 3, Scene 7 constitutes the play's most literal staging of this theme

  • Only once he can no longer see does he recognise how gravely he misjudged both of his sons

• The Fool functions as a structural device throughout the middle of the play specifically to expose this gap between appearance and reality: 

  • His riddles and songs permit him to voice uncomfortable truths that no other would dare articulate directly

• Come the end, Shakespeare demonstrates the cost of a world constructed on performance rather than sincerity: 

  • The alliance between Goneril and Regan, founded on self-interest, collapses into murder and suicide once that self-interest turns them against each other

What is Shakespeare's intention?

• Shakespeare warns against valuing performed loyalty and flattery over honest, if less flattering, truth

• He illustrates how socially marginal figures — fools, beggars, the blind, the mad — are frequently better positioned to perceive and articulate the truth than those with power and status

• He suggests that the stripping away of status, sight or sanity can, paradoxically, bring characters closer to genuine understanding

Family, loyalty and betrayal

King Lear presents two families whose relationships are destroyed by fathers who cannot distinguish loyalty from betrayal. Shakespeare uses the parallel stories of Lear and Gloucester to show how damaging betrayal can be within a family, and how private conflicts can eventually become much wider political crises. 

Knowledge and evidence

• Both fathers commit the same fundamental error early in the play: each mistakes a loyal child's honesty for disloyalty and is deceived by a more manipulative child:

  • Lear banishes Cordelia in the opening scene for refusing to flatter him 

  • Gloucester falls for all of Edmund’s lies and disowns the innocent Edgar

• As the play develops, loyalty is shown to persist even under active punishment:

  • Kent continues to serve Lear in disguise despite being banished on pain of death: he endures humiliation in the stocks, refusing to abandon Lear

  • Edgar continues to protect and guide his father even after Gloucester has rejected him, hiding his identity while trying to spare him further anguish. 

• Betrayal, meanwhile, escalates steadily throughout the middle of the play:

  • Goneril and Regan strip their father of his knights and his shelter, culminating in Lear being turned out into the storm by his own children

  • Edmund's betrayal of Gloucester directly precipitates his father's blinding, the most violent consequence of familial disloyalty in the entire play

• Shakespeare also depicts loyalty and betrayal operating between siblings, not solely between parents and children: 

  • Goneril and Regan's rivalry over Edmund eventually turns their alliance against one another, culminating in poisoning and suicide

• By the resolution, Shakespeare rewards loyalty only partially, and at considerable cost:

  • Cordelia's loyalty to Lear allows them to reconcile, yet she is executed regardless, denying the audience a clean restoration of justice

  • Edgar's loyalty affords Gloucester a measure of peace before his death, but does not prevent that death from occurring

What is Shakespeare's intention?

• Shakespeare presents familial loyalty as something that must be actively demonstrated through action, rather than assumed or merely declared through words

• He explores how betrayal within a family can destabilise an entire society, since both plots show private disloyalty escalating into public and political consequences

• He deliberately denies loyal characters a full reward for their faithfulness, suggesting that loyalty possesses value in itself, even where it cannot guarantee a just outcome

Justice and suffering

The play repeatedly questions whether suffering is deserved, or whether people can suffer regardless of what they have done. Very different ideas about justice are presented, but the audience is never given a clear answer. 

Knowledge and evidence

• Both Lear and Gloucester suffer far beyond what their mistakes deserve: 

  • Neither intends the suffering that follows, yet both lose almost everything because of serious errors of judgement

  • This raises the question of whether their punishment is proportionate to their fault 

• As the play develops, several characters articulate their own theories of justice directly:

  • Albany sees Cornwall's death as proof that wrongdoing is punished from above

  • Gloucester reaches the opposite conclusion: that the gods torment humans for sport, with no higher purpose at all

• Gloucester's blinding makes the question of suffering impossible to ignore:

  • This forces the audience to directly confront the extreme gap between what characters deserve and what happens to them 

• Suffering also produces genuine empathy earlier in the play, complicating any straightforwardly nihilistic reading: 

  • Lear's suffering in the storm produces his first real concern for others, admitting, "I have ta'en / Too little care of this," when speaking of the poor

• Come the end of the play, Shakespeare deliberately withholds any clean sense of justice:

  • Cordelia, the most morally blameless character in the play, is executed regardless of her innocence, and Lear dies immediately afterwards from grief

  • Edmund's sole attempt at redemption, ordering Cordelia's release, arrives too late to alter the outcome, denying the audience even this consolation

What is Shakespeare's intention?

• Shakespeare challenges the audience's expectation that suffering should be proportionate to wrongdoing, permitting innocent characters to suffer alongside the guilty

• He explores suffering as something capable of producing genuine wisdom and empathy, without ever suggesting that this wisdom suffices to avert tragedy

• Shakespeare ultimately leaves the question of a just universe unresolved, declining to offer the audience the reassurance of a clearly moral order

Sources

• Shakespeare, W. (1951) ‘King Lear’, in P. Alexander (ed.) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text. London: Collins [SME Digital Texts Library edition]