In the twentieth century, the introduction of psychoanalytic inquiry and, especially Sigmund Freud’s own use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural symbols, including King Lear,

gave new impetus and a new technique for the study of Shakespeare’s characters. For Freud, Cordelia embodied the silence of Death. Scholars in the twentieth century also sought to understand King Lear as an intellectual statement about the nature of Nature itself, as John Danby did in Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature. The drama has also been seen as a commentary about the nature of being-in-the-world, about what comprises being human, about the benevolence or malevolence or even the non-existence of providence, of goodness, of charity, and of hope. The inquiry into the play’s vision of the place of the gods in the motives of mankind perhaps reached its peak—it is doubtful it reached its conclusion—with William Elton’s study King Lear and the Gods, in which he argues against the position advanced by a number of Shakespeare scholars, like Kenneth Myrick, who argued that within the tragedy and bleakness of experience in King Lear, there is redemption, salvation, and marks of Christian optimism. By the last decades of the century, techniques like the New Historicism focused less on the meaning of King Lear as it might be revealed through a study of its themes, structure, images, and characters, and more on understanding the play in terms of its own time, how it fit into, interacted with, and appeared in its own original historical context. Thus Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., writing in 1995, examines the events of King Lear in ‘‘King Lear in Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes’’ in the context of the stoicism of Seneca and Montaigne. In 2001, Terry Reilly brought a study of inheritance laws and customs practiced in the Kent district of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bear on a reading of the play in ‘‘King Lear:The KentishForest and the Problem of Thirds.’’