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 Oxford Shakespeare was first printed. This resulted in many controversial choices: for example, presenting "Hamlet" with several famous speeches relegated to appendices on the grounds that Shakespeare added them after the original performances; presenting two separate texts of "King Lear" due to the drastic differences between the two extant texts; and changing the name of Falstaff in "Henry IV Part One" to 'Oldcastle' due to historical evidence that this name was used in the first performances even though it never survived to print. The Oxford "Complete Works" was the first to emphasize Shakespeare's collaborative work, describing "Macbeth", "Measure for Measure" and "Timon