John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber & Faber, 1948)
Excerpt:
We go to great writers for the truth. Or for whatever reason we go to them in the first place it is for the truth we return to them, again and again. What this truth is, both fort he poetry which we call universal and for the criticism which tries to get at this truth, I propose to examine in Part III. The present section is by way of prologue.
King Lear can be regarded as a play dramatizing the meanings of the single word, ‘Nature.’ When looked at in this way it becomes obvious at once that King Lear is a drama of ideas – such a drama of ideas not as the Morality play had been, a drama of abstractions; nor such a drama of amusing talk about theses as Bernard Shaw’s is; a drama of ideas, however, nonetheless and Shakespeare’s own creation: the Novum Organum of Elizabethan thought.