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In Shakespeare tragedy the moral order inclusively includes good and evil. However evil is inhuman and anti-social, it does not always exist outside the total order, but its inside. If evil attacks and destroys order, it is equal to destroy evil itself. Evil necessarily passes away. But when evil defeats, destroys and disappears, we have some doubts that good, or virtue itself is very uncertain and unstable. Because good and evil simultaneously exist in human world, and cannot defeat each other onesidedly. In the ending of King Lear virtue may be triumphing over evil. If virtue must win, then we still wish to be virtuous in order to be on the winningside. And this is to poison the very fountains of self-sacrificial love. The play is the greatest handling of this question because no easy or trivial answer is given. What is given is a tremendous balance of all the potential greatness against the sense of value and the sense of waste. But Shakespeare allows us no choice but suffering because Lear's immense vitality possesses such a capacity for pathos from which we cannot exclude ourselves. It is not easy to trace the great changes of Lear's affect, but King Lear's greatness cannot fully be apprehended without it. Since we will find in Lear's suffering a kind of order, though no idea of order. It is only human and natural that is formalized. No vision of skepticism and Christian redemption is appropriate to this great change of superior vitality into various suffering and meaningless death. In conclusion, the main theme is that Lear achieves his recognition and self-knowledge through his severe ordeal and suffering, but that is very dangerous and unstable to sustain continuously in this tragic world. Lear's recognition is not meaningful but the human world seems to be very ambiguous, uncertain, and empty in spite of Cordelia's sacrifice.
