King Lear: The Unnatural Nuptial Breach

Abstract

Shakespeare's King Lear clearly offers an inquiry into nature-into the nature of man and his relation to the natural order.1 In Elizabethan England that relationship was one wherein man functioned within a social order governed by the natural laws of a harmoniously ordered universe. Thus if man's actions threatened the social order, they assumed cosmic significance by threatening the balanced stability of the entire natural order. In King Lear those responsible for maintaining that order abdicated their duties; consequently, nature responded with punitive measures to reintegrate mankind and his social order with the demands of a harmonious universe.2 Lear's arbitrary and foolish division of his kingdom between his two older daughters represented a serious disruption of that harmonious universe wherein a king ruled the social order by divine, and hence natural, right. As a king, it was not Lear's prerogative to abandon his rule for a life of irresponsible security; he could not abandon his royal obligations without disturbing the natural order. The late eclipses in the sun and the moon portend no good for us, old Gloucester mused. Those phenomena were but cosmic auguries of the social disruptions which were to plague Lear's realm. Unknowingly, Edmund ironically predicted the unnatural disintegration which would rend the kingdom: promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily, as of unnaturalness between the child and parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions of state, menaces and maledictions against king and nobles; needless diflidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, breaches, and I know not what (I. ii. I55-i63)3. All of the evils that Edmund enumerated were indeed to convulse the social order within Lear's kingdom. Children did unnaturally reject parents, dissolutions of ancient amities bred deaths, and maledictions against kings and nobles did divide the state. Shakespeare's manipulation of these elements in King Lear is obvious. What is not so obvious-and critics have neglected the subject-is the playwright's use of unnatural nuptial breaches for gaining perceptive insights into the play and its Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare's audience readily recognized the family as the smallest social unit of the larger social order. Friars, monks, and preachers had indoctrinated them with this basic tenet of Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology.