KING LEAR
1. Pessimism
http://home.pacific.net.au/~greg.hub/lear.html

2. Themes of madness
http://www.suite101.com/content/the-...g-lear-a178390

on the above link, there are further links for Themes etc.

3. poetic injustice in the play


4. shakespearean concept of tragedy
http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com...ragedy_19.html


5. Themes of greed, evil in characters
http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/...KingLear44.asp

http://www.field-of-themes.com/shake...ays/Elear2.htm

Themes
Suffering can transform a contemptible human being into a good person. Lear appears to redeem himself by the end of the play. An important passage revealing the change Lear is undergoing appears in Act III, Scene IV, during the terrible storm. While his fool takes shelter in a hovel, Lear remains standing for a moment in the rain, saying he pities the poor people who must endure the elements. He regrets failing to do more to help them, saying:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (3. 4. 33-41)

Another passage that encapsulates the theme is spoken by Regan:

..............O sir, to willful men
..............The injuries that they themselves procure
..............Must be their schoolmasters. (2. 4. 316-318)
Ironically and paradoxically, Lear's progressing mental derangement makes him keenly aware of his faults and weaknesses. At the beginning of the play, he is sane but mad; at the end of the play, he is mad but sane. The great 19th Century American poet Emily Dickinson wrote a one-stanza poem on the madness of sanity (and the sanity of madness) in 1861 (probably without any thought of King Lear). The first three lines aptly sum up Lear's behavior:
..............Much Madness is divinest Sense—
..............To a discerning Eye—
..............Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
..............(Emily Dickinson) As in Macbeth and Othello, all things are not as they appear. At the beginning of the play, the Lears and other characters are presented as normal and caring. But as Shakespeare rubs away the pretty veneers of the characters, we find greed, betrayal, lust for power, and cruelty. In other words, they are anything but normal and caring.
Greed and lust for power corrupt human beings and bring about their downfall. Goneril and Regan reject their own father in favor of material possessions and power. Ultimately, their cupidity results in their downfall.
Fate (the gods) turns humans into playthings. As Gloucester says in Act IV, Scene I, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport” (4. 1. 44-45). This is an old theme in world history and literature. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Job wonders why he, a righteous man, suffers so many reverses, including the loss of his material possessions, his sons, and his health. In Greek tragedy—in particular, in the plays of Sophocles, such as Oedipus Rex—fate plays an extremely important role as an inexorable force. In the Nineteenth Century, English novelist Thomas Hardy populated his novels with characters dominated by forces outside of them or irresistible forces within them. The environment, Darwinian determinism, and the human libido all turned humans into marionettes.
Candor has a sharp edge. Telling the truth can deeply wound the listener as well as the speaker. Cordelia wins our admiration because she is forthright and sincere. However, her honesty offends her father, and he disowns her. The Earl of Kent, a loyal subject of Lear, suffers banishment for speaking up for Cordelia. Like the previous theme, this theme is an old one in world history and literature. In 399 B.C. the Greek philosopher Socrates paid with his life for being honest and asking probing questions that exposed the hypocrisy of others, declaring that his god had commanded him to do so. In England, statesman and humanist Sir Thomas More also died (1535) for being honest—in particular, for his outspoken opposition to King Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon on grounds that it violated moral law.
Advanced age and wisdom do not go hand-in-hand. Lear is probably about 80, but he is often childish in his judgments until suffering reforms him. Shakespeare's depiction of Lear may have been, in part, an attempt to discredit or satirize the tendency of people in Elizabethan England automatically to revere elders and authority figures.

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