Nature imagery in King Lear
The concept of nature is wide ranging in this drama and this is manifested by the extensive use of nature imagery throughout the entire course of the play's action.
Indeed nature is at the very heart of the 'word world' of King Lear.
Heavenly nature:
The most cursory scrutiny of the play will reveal just how varied is the imagery associated with the concept of nature. In act 1 for instance we find Lear as king swear by the power of light and darkness:
"Lear: Let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower. For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be—" (1.1.109-13)
This is an appropriate approach to nature given the pagan setting of the play. Later in this act, Gloucester claims:
"Gloucester: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide, in cities mutinies, in countries discord, in palaces treason, and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The king falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child." (1.2.99-108)
In essence, the supernatural powers of nature may exert ill effects on the world of man. Here Gloucester refers to the belief current in Shakespeare's day and centuries before, that events in the 'macrocosm'; the celestial spheres, were reflected in the 'microcosm'; the little world of man. Edmund mocks at this approach to nature, dismissing it as mere superstition.
"we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"(1.2.127-35)
Lear in referring to "our nature" is obviously commenting on his own kingly nature, together with his instinct for power
That thou hast sought to make us break our vows, Which we durst never yet, and with strained pride To come betwixt our sentence and our power, Which nor our nature nor our place can bear, Our potency made good, take thy reward: (1.1.171-75)
This is obviously not the nature referred to by Lear addressing Regan on the subject of his knights, appeals to her to understand what lies behind his need for his retinue of knights. "Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is cheap as beasts" (2.4.264-5).
Nor is the goddess 'nature' invoked by Edmund to be identified with either of the above interpretations; "Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law My services are bound." (1.2.1-2)
Perverted nature
Suggestions of the unnatural, the perversion of what is normal or natural is evident in Lear's appalling outbursts when he disowns Cordelia or when he curses Goneril:
Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility. Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her. If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. (1.4.268-76)
Later, addressing Regan:
You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, You fen-sucked fogs drawn by the powerful sun, To fall and blister! (2.4.159-63)
Lear calls upon nature's destructive power to strike at the very heart of created matter "Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!" (3.2.9-10).
Primal nature
Storm imagery is used by Lear and those associated with him throughout the storm episodes in act 3.
Gentlemen: Contending with the fretful elements. Bids the winds blow the earth into the sea Or swell the curlèd water 'bove the main, That things might change or cease. Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to-and-fro–conflicting wind and rain. (3.1.4-12)
Then Lear:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulfurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o' th' world, (3.2.1-8)
And Kent:
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never Remember to have heard. (3.2.45-7)
This imagery of primal nature serves many purposes. Lear's language together with his actions 'minds' the fury of the physical storm, which in itself is a symbol of the tempest in his mind: he is thus himself the 'spirit' of the storm and a reminder to us of the intimate interconnection between the cosmic and the terrestrial, which would have been taken for granted in Shakespeare's' day. The 'storm imagery' insists on man's vulnerability in the face of the fury of nature. In soliloquy with Fool, Lear railing in the storm says:
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters. I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness. I never gave you kingdom, called you children. You owe me no subscription. Why then, let fall Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave— (3.2.14-9)
While later Kent seeks to calm and comfort Lear in the storm;
Here is the place, my lord. Good my lord, enter. The tyranny of the open night’s too rough For nature to endure. (3.4.1-3).
The emphasis throughout is on the destructive power of elemental nature.
Healing nature
Elsewhere however nature imagery is used more positively to suggest the benevolent aspect of the natural world in its influence on man's life. The reference to Lear in his madness, wandering about, crowned with garlands of weeds and wildflowers.
Cordelia: Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn (4.4.4-6)
This quote is more significant than might at first appear since all the plants mentioned in this catalogue of Lear's garlands have curative properties and were commonly used in the treatment of mental illness.
Cordelia herself, urges the doctor to use all of his powers to cure her father, saying;
All blessed secrets, All you unpublished virtues of the earth, Spring with my tears. Be aidant and remediate In the good man’s distress. Seek, seek for him, Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life That wants the means to lead it. (4.4.16-20)
Imagery of spring and of harvest is associated with Cordelia herself, as a means linking her with all that is most positive in the natural cycle, through the symbolic associations of spring with the promise of a world new-made and of autumn's bounty with richness and fertility.
Animal nature
The forces of nature are also present in Shakespeare's use of 'animal imagery'. For example, man is constantly compared to the beasts.
Lear: O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s. (2.4.261-4)
Lear in dialogue with Edgar, seeing that he (Edgar) is barely clothed, living wild 'unburdened by the trappings of civilization', Lear tears at this own clothes:
Lear: Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.—Is man no more than this? Consider him well.—Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on ’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.— Off, off, you lendings! Come. Unbutton here. (tears at his clothes) (3.4.93-101)
Without his "lendings" the trappings of civilisation, which cushion him against exposure to the "raw nature" of the heath and the storm, man is merely the poor, bare, forked animal (two-legged) that Edgar has become in his role as 'poor Tom'.
Animal imagery is also used to emphasise the horror to which Lear was subjected in the night of the storm;
"The lion and the belly-pinched wolf Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs, And bids what will take all."
Nature as a jungle world where human predators stalk one another in a war of all on all is epitomised in the beast 'imagery' used of Goneril and Regan; "detested kite" those "pelican daughters"; "dog-hearted daughters"; "boarish fangs"; "tigers, not daughters".
Ultimately they become 'monsters of the deep' preying on each other.
This type of 'natural imagery' is intended to suggest human nature at its most 'unnatural', that is at a level below that of the beasts.
Hence, comparisons between the behaviour of the 'derogate' human and wild beasts work to the disadvantage of the former; "whose reverence ever the head lugged bear would lack"; "If wolves had at thy gate howled that stern time, Thou shouldst have said, “Good porter, turn the key,”"
The animal references in the utterances of Poor Tom/Edgar on the one hand, reflect the moral emphasis on the beastal in mankind, already discussed "hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey" but on the other, they simply emphasise the reality of what it is like to live the life of "houseless poverty" at the level of hardest subsistence.
Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt, and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow dung for salads, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing and stocked, punished and imprisoned; who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his body, Horse to ride and weapon to wear. But mice and rats and such small deer Have been Tom’s food for seven long year. (3.4.120-30)
The emphasis on man's existence as precarious, exposed and wretched is to be found also in Edgar's speech to Gloucester at Dover in act 4, where he presents what seems a God's eye view of the world;
How fearful And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down Hangs one that gathers samphire—dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice. And yon tall anchoring bark, (4.6.12-19)
From this perspective "poor, bare, forked animal" (poor, naked, two-legged) that Lear had found in Poor Tom and by application, also in himself in the course of the storm episodes.
These passages illustrate the extraordinary variety and range of nature imagery and point to the ubiquity their use, the contrastingly vulgar and subtle uses to convey meaning. The dramatic value of Shakespeare's approach is in this knowledge of the world, shared with the audience, of using multi-various facets nature as conceptual dramatic devices in his plays. Nature extends from the sublime and the base; it accounts for and encompasses, yet transcends all points in between.
