at all levels of social and private life. King Lear  is a presentation 
of the new strategy of culture and power as it affects the 
state, the family, and the individual psyche:

     Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.
     Give me the map there. Know we have divided
     In three our kingdom;

     The map was also a novelty in the sixteenth century, age 
of Mercator’s projection, and was key to the new vision of 
peripheries of power and wealth. Columbus had been a 
cartographer before he was a navigator; and the discovery that 
it was possible to continue in a straight-line course, as if space 
were uniform and continuous, was a major shift in human 
awareness in the Renaissance. More important, the map brings 
forward at once a principal theme of King Lear , namely the