The themes in King Lear grow out of one old man’s mistake: he asks his daughters to prove their love in words, gives his kingdom to the two who flatter him, and then must find out, stripped of everything, what love, justice, and a human being really are.
The play works through a double plot. Lear misjudges his daughters, and the Earl of Gloucester misjudges his sons, so each theme appears twice, once in each family. This guide explains the seven major themes, with the lines that express each one, and ends with a reading of the play’s last and smallest gesture. For the story and the people, see our full guide to King Lear and our guide to the King Lear characters.
At a Glance
Here are the major themes in King Lear for quick reference.
Love and Flattery
The play begins with a test that confuses love with the words used to describe it. Goneril claims to love her father “more than word can wield the matter,” and Regan claims to outdo her. Both win a third of the kingdom. Cordelia, who loves him most, will not compete. “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent,” she says to herself, and when Lear presses her, she says she loves him “According to my bond, no more nor less.”
Lear hears only coldness. Kent, who sees clearly, warns him that quiet speech can hide deep love: “Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness.” Cordelia herself names what she lacks as “that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not.” The King of France, who takes her without a dowry, gives the play’s definition of real love: “Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from th’ entire point.”
The rest of the play proves Cordelia right. The flattering daughters soon turn on their father, while the silent one returns to rescue him. The same pattern runs through the subplot, where Edmund’s smooth lies defeat his brother’s honesty. By the end, the play’s final speech urges the survivors to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” the lesson Lear failed to learn in the first scene.
Parents and Children
King Lear is built on two broken families. Lear disowns Cordelia and trusts Goneril and Regan. Gloucester believes Edmund’s forged letter and has Edgar hunted as a traitor. Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, sees the parallel directly when he watches the mad king: “He childed as I fathered.”
The play’s most famous lines about this theme are Lear’s curses on his daughters. When Goneril cuts his retinue, he cries, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” In the storm he calls ingratitude a kind of self-mutilation: “Filial ingratitude! / Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to ’t?” Yet the play does not simply blame the children. Lear gave away his power while expecting to keep his authority, and when he protests to Regan, “I gave you all,” she answers, “And in good time you gave it.”
The theme is resolved, as far as it can be, in reversal. When Lear wakes in Cordelia’s care, the father kneels to the child and asks her forgiveness. Later, facing prison with her, he imagines their life together: “When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness.” The order of parent over child, which Lear demanded in the first scene, has turned upside down, and it is the closest he comes to peace.
Nature
The word “nature” and its relatives run through the whole play, and the characters use them in opposite ways. For Lear and Gloucester, nature is a moral order that binds children to parents and subjects to kings. When that order breaks, they call it “unnatural.” Gloucester, deceived about Edgar, calls him an “Unnatural, detested, brutish villain,” and sees the eclipses as signs of the breakdown: “the bond cracked ’twixt son and father.”
Edmund means something else entirely. In his first soliloquy he prays, “Thou, Nature, art my goddess,” meaning the raw, competitive nature in which the strong and clever take what they can, free of laws and customs that call him “base.” He mocks his father’s belief in the stars as “the excellent foppery of the world.” Lear, meanwhile, calls on Nature as a goddess to curse Goneril with childlessness, and in his madness he asks the question the play cannot answer: “Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?”
The storm in Act 3 brings this theme into physical form. Nature itself turns violent, and Lear rages against it bareheaded. The play never settles which view of nature is true. The daughters and Edmund seem to prove Edmund right, but the loyalty of Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, and a nameless servant who dies trying to save Gloucester suggests that kindness is natural too.
Sight and Blindness
From the first scene the play asks who can see. When Lear banishes Cordelia, Kent tells him, “See better, Lear.” Later, confused by Goneril’s treatment, Lear asks, “Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?” He has eyes, but he cannot see what is in front of him.
Gloucester’s story turns the metaphor into horror. Cornwall puts out his eyes, crying “Out, vile jelly! / Where is thy luster now?” and Regan orders him thrust out of his own gates to “smell / His way to Dover.” Only in that moment does Gloucester learn that Edmund betrayed him and that Edgar was innocent. He puts the paradox in four words: “I stumbled when I saw.”
When the blind earl meets the mad king near Dover, the theme reaches its strangest point. Lear tells him, “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears,” and Gloucester answers, “I see it feelingly.” Both men now see the world clearly, one through madness and one through blindness, having lost what they thought they needed to see at all.
Madness and Wisdom
Lear fears madness long before it arrives. “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” he cries at the end of Act 1. In the storm he feels it coming, “My wits begin to turn,” and tries to avoid thinking about his daughters: “O, that way madness lies. Let me shun that.” When he meets Edgar disguised as the mad beggar Poor Tom, he takes him for a philosopher, and his own reason gives way.
Yet madness in King Lear is often where the truth is spoken. The Fool, whose job is to be foolish, tells Lear, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” The mad Lear of Act 4 sees through the whole social order: “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all.” Watching him, Edgar calls it “Reason in madness!”
The three kinds of folly in the play, the Fool’s professional folly, Edgar’s feigned madness, and Lear’s real madness, all come together on the heath. Gloucester sums up the upside-down world in one line: “’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.” In this play the sane and powerful act with the most cruelty, and the mad and powerless see the most clearly.
Justice and the Gods
The characters of King Lear constantly call on the gods, and the play keeps asking whether anyone is listening. Lear insists in the storm that he is “a man / More sinned against than sinning.” Gloucester, blinded, gives the bleakest answer: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport.” Edgar gives the most hopeful one. After defeating Edmund, he tells him that their father’s blinding was punishment for fathering Edmund outside marriage: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.”
Human justice fares no better. In his madness Lear imagines a judge and a thief changing places and asks, “which is the justice, which is the thief?” He sees that authority itself is only power: “a dog’s obeyed in office.” The mock trial of Goneril and Regan that the mad king holds in a shelter from the storm, with a Fool and a feigned madman as judges, is the only trial the sisters face.
The ending tests every answer. When Edmund confesses that he has ordered Cordelia’s death, Albany prays, “The gods defend her!” Moments later Lear enters with her body in his arms. Whether that silence means the gods are cruel, indifferent, or absent is left to the audience, and it is the question the play leaves most open.
What a Human Needs
Lear begins the play wanting to keep “The name and all th’ addition to a king” without the responsibilities, and his daughters take the additions away one by one. When they ask why he needs any knights at all, he answers with one of the play’s central speeches: “O, reason not the need!” If human beings were given only what they need to survive, “Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”
The storm teaches him what he never learned as king. Before entering the hovel he thinks for the first time of the poor of his kingdom: “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.” He admits, “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp.” Then he meets Poor Tom, nearly naked, and sees humanity at its barest: “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”
Gloucester reaches the same conclusion by his own road. Giving his purse to the beggar who leads him, he prays that the rich might learn to feel what the poor feel, “So distribution should undo excess / And each man have enough.” Two powerful men who never thought about the poor learn, through suffering, that a king and a beggar are made of the same flesh.
A Closer Reading: “Pray You, Undo This Button”
Many of the play’s themes are carried by something as ordinary as clothing. In Act 2, when Regan asks why he needs his knights, Lear points to his daughters’ fine clothes: a lady’s gown is more than she needs to keep warm, and nobody asks her to justify it. Clothing is the “addition” that marks rank, the visible sign of what separates a king from a beast.
In the storm, Lear sees Poor Tom, dressed in a blanket, and tries to become him. “Thou art the thing itself,” he says, and then, pulling at his own clothes: “Off, off, you lendings!” His royal garments are only borrowed. In Act 4 he wanders near Dover crowned with wild flowers and weeds, and now he sees what clothing hides: “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all.” When he wakes in Cordelia’s care, he does not recognize the clothes he is wearing: “all the skill I have / Remembers not these garments.”
The last thing Lear asks for in the play is a small act of undressing. Holding Cordelia’s body, he cries “Never, never, never, never, never!” and then says:
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
The text does not say whose button it is. Many readers take it to be at Lear’s own throat, as he struggles for breath; others think it is Cordelia’s, loosened in the hope that she might breathe. Either way, the gesture completes the line that began with “Off, off, you lendings.” The king who once demanded that his daughters compete for his favor now asks a bystander for help with a button and thanks him, politely, as “sir.” After everything the play has taken from him, what remains is the courtesy of one person to another, the simplest kind of need, and the simplest kind of care.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of King Lear, answered briefly.
What Is the Main Theme of King Lear?
There is no single theme, but many readers put the relationship between parents and children at the center, together with the difference between true love and flattery. The play’s tragedy begins when Lear rewards the daughters who flatter him and banishes the one who loves him.
What Does Blindness Symbolize in King Lear?
Blindness stands for the failure to see the truth about other people. Lear is figuratively blind to his daughters’ natures, and Gloucester is literally blinded, learning the truth about his sons only after he loses his eyes. “I stumbled when I saw,” he says.
What Does the Storm Represent in King Lear?
The storm mirrors Lear’s inner turmoil and the breakdown of order in his kingdom and family. Lear makes the link himself: “This tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else.”
Is There Justice in King Lear?
The villains are punished, but the good suffer too, and Cordelia dies for no reason the play can justify. Characters disagree about whether the gods are just, cruel, or absent, and the ending leaves the question open.
Why Is Nature Important in King Lear?
Because the characters mean different things by it. To Lear and Gloucester, nature is a moral bond between parents and children. To Edmund, it is raw self-interest, free of law. The play tests both views, and much of its horror comes from children acting against the bonds their fathers call natural.
Related Reading
Three pages that take King Lear and its ideas further.