<P> The New Cambridge Shakespeare has published separate editions of Q and F; the most recent Pelican Shakespeare edition contains both the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio text as well as a conflated version; the New Arden edition edited by R.A. Foakes is the only recent edition to offer the traditional conflated text . Both Anthony Nuttall of Oxford University and Harold Bloom of Yale University have endorsed the view of Shakespeare having revised the tragedy at least once during his lifetime . As Bloom indicates: "At the close of Shakespeare's revised King Lear, a reluctant Edgar becomes King of Britain, accepting his destiny but in the accents of despair . Nuttall speculates that Edgar, like Shakespeare himself, usurps the power of manipulating the audience by deceiving poor Gloucester ." </P> <P> Analysis and criticism of King Lear over the centuries has been extensive . </P> <P> John F. Danby, in his Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature--A Study 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 by Hobbes . Along with the two views of Nature, Lear contains two views of Reason, brought out in Gloucester and Edmund's speeches on astrology (1.2). The rationality of the Edmund party is one with which a modern audience more readily identifies . But the Edmund party carries bold rationalism to such extremes that it becomes madness: a madness - in - reason, the ironic counterpart of Lear's "reason in madness" (IV. 6.190) and the Fool's wisdom - in - folly . This betrayal of reason lies behind the play's later emphasis on feeling . </P> <P> The two Natures and the two Reasons imply two societies . Edmund is the New Man, a member of an age of competition, suspicion, glory, in contrast with the older society which has come down from the Middle Ages, with its belief in co-operation, reasonable decency, and respect for the whole as greater than the part . King Lear is thus an allegory . The older society, that of the medieval vision, with its doting king, falls into error, and is threatened by the new Machiavellianism; it is regenerated and saved by a vision of a new order, embodied in the king's rejected daughter . Cordelia, in the allegorical scheme, is threefold: a person; an ethical principle (love); and a community . Nevertheless, Shakespeare's understanding of the New Man is so extensive as to amount almost to sympathy . Edmund is the last great expression in Shakespeare of that side of Renaissance individualism--the energy, the emancipation, the courage--which has made a positive contribution to the heritage of the West . "He embodies something vital which a final synthesis must reaffirm . But he makes an absolute claim which Shakespeare will not support . It is right for man to feel, as Edmund does, that society exists for man, not man for society . It is not right to assert the kind of man Edmund would erect to this supremacy ." </P>

Who becomes king at the end of the play