Natural Justice and King Lear

Abstract

The debate between the natural law tradition asserting a necessary relationship between law and morals and positivism asserting that law is simply whatever the sovereign commands is as old as Western Civilization.' This debate asks whether law has a necessary moral core. If justice means reaching results in accord with proper application of the law, justice can be confined as a conclusion both within and about law. That, in caricature, is the core of positivism. Natural law insists that judgments about results reached under the law are the subject of judgments based on some other standard. These principles, upon which results reached under the law can be judged, themselves are universal in application, hence "natural." I suggest in this paper that the conflict between natural law and positivism appears as one of the themes within King Lear.2 In the swirl of controversies about law and legitimacy that followed from both the Renaissance and the Reformation, these ideas were organized around the categories of traditional rights and royal absolutism emerging in its divine right moment. So long as people could persuade themselves that tradition defined what was natural and just, and so long as kings saw their role was to enforce traditional rights, the tension between law and morals remained hidden. One consequence of the ferment created by both the Renaissance and the Reformation was the destruction of the idea that the actual and the ideal state could be one. Natural law and positivism, though anachronistic terms, nonetheless serve as convenient short hand for ideas that already were very much in the air. I make no claim concerning the meaning of King Lear. All I want to do is point to yet another strand of meaning. I join those who argue that "Any Elizabethan use of the Lear 'matter' could hardly avoid key contemporary issues of politics: the succession to the throne, the division of sovereignty, foreign invasion, and domestic loyalty."3 King Lear was written in 1605, and an examination of the circumstances in England at the time it was written suggests that what we today would call the debate between