King Lear of King Lear" (1949), argues that "Lear" dramatizes, among other things, the current meanings of "Nature". The words "nature," "natural" and "unnatural" occur over forty times in the play, reflecting a debate in Shakespeare's time about what nature really was like; this debate pervades the play and finds symbolic expression in Lear's changing attitude to Thunder. There are two strongly contrasting views of human nature in the play: that of the Lear party (Lear, Gloucester, Albany, Kent), exemplifying the philosophy of Bacon and Hooker, and that of the Edmund party (Edmund, Cornwall, Goneril, Regan), akin to the views later formulated
The History of King Lear Reader and Audience to have Vertue and Piety meet so unjust a Reward. . . . We rejoice at the deaths of the "Bastard" and the two Sisters, as of Monsters in Nature under whom the very Earth must groan. And we see with horror and Indignation the Death of the King, "Cordelia" and "Kent". The translator and author Thomas Cooke also gave Tate's version his blessing: in the introduction to his own play "The Triumphs of Love and Honour" (1731), he commented that Lear and Gloucester "are made sensible or their Errors, and are placed in a State of