'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.' These words from Hamlet are echoed, even more pessimistically, in Shakespeare's later play, The Tragedy of King Lear where Gloucester says: 'Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport'. In Lear, the characters are subjected to the various tragedies of life over and over again.
An abundance of cyclic imagery in Lear shows that good people are abused and wronged regardless of their own noble deeds or intentions. Strapped to a wheel of fire, humans suffer and endure, prosper and decline, their very existence imaged as a voyage out and a return. …
