The story of King Lear follows the metamorphosis of a King into a man. It is a journey wrought with both physical and moral suffering which develops the character of Lear from "sanity to petulance to sanity" (Billington). Cordelia's death reflects the inconsistency of moral justice in the world; Shakespeare acknowledges that wisdom is only attained by suffering. He reveals however that this wisdom does not protect the individual against future suffering "bound upon a wheel of fire". "Cordelia's death is gratuitous but dramatically necessary" (O'Toole). It represents the hostility of the gods in relation to humanity, exposing the unjust world in which each human is connected to humanity.
             The play itself is a "spectacle of violence, ferocity and pain" suffering, disorder, madness, cruelty on mass scale. It is in itself, a tragedy, invoking woe and wonder, pity and fear. Edgar as Tom O Bedlam comments "Basest and poorest shape that ever penury, in contempt of man, brought near to beast." It also raises the issue of the problem of evil, of justice or injustice of universe, and affiliated with it, as with these horrors of our own time, the questions of the existence of god, or gods, and more unnerving, of their benevolence, malevolence or indifference.
             The gods themselves are central to the play as a whole. For "The stars above us govern our conditions." They are responsible for the madness and injustice that ensues. Throughout characters question their motives in their actions only to endure a supposed "promised end/ or image of that horror." Characters try to make sense of their experience, rationalize it or heal themselves by reference to tentative, confusing and sometimes absurdly pathetic concepts of divinity. Albany exclaims "This shows you are above/ you justicers, that these our nether crimes/So speedily can venge." Kent's argu
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