King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism

Abstract

The moral problems that are explored in King Lear can be clarified by viewing them in the context of Shakespeare's history plays and of contemporary social conflicts. Lear and Gloucester share the values of a feudal aristocracy that is threatened by an acquisitive and irreverent bourgeois class; the argument over Lear's train reflects the Tudor monarchs' struggle against maintenance, the right of an aristocrat to keep an armed retinue. The Tudor crisis of the aristocracy had tragic connotations for Shakespeare, and the heroes of his later plays are usually figures of the “old regime.” This is not inconsistent with Marx's concept of tragedy, but Shakespeare's humanism should be recognized as nostalgic rather than forward-looking.