Why is it difficult to come up with an easy moral understanding of King Lear?

Answer 1

There is a certain amount of moral ambiguity in King Lear. On the one hand, Cordelia seems like the favoured daughter, but she is leading French troops to overthrow the government of England which the English, under Regan and Goneril, Edmund and Albany are defending from foreign invasion.

Lear seems to be mistreated when he is thrown out into the storm, but he has treated his daughters terribly, and has used his retirement as an excuse to behave irresponsibly. There is a lot of truth in Goneril's upbraiding of him, and he repies in an extremely cruel way.

Finally, the universe of King Lear is not the universe which moralisers like to find in tragedy. They like to find a tragic hero who is flawed and who goes down to destruction as a result, so that they can point out the platitude that such a flaw is a vice to be avoided. But at the end, Lear is still alive and it is Cordelia who is dead, murdered pointlessly by one of Edmund's minions. Lear howls over her dead body, howling that the universe allows cats and rats and flawed tragic heroes to live, and yet Cordelia, who had no flaws at all, is dead.