The idea of homogeneous segmentation of persons and 
relations and functions could only appear to the sixteenth 
century as the dissolution of all bonds of sense and reason. 
King Lear  offers a complete demonstration of how it felt to live 
through the change from medieval to Renaissance time and 
space, from an inclusive to an exclusive sense of the world. His 
changed attitude to Cordelia exactly reflects the idea of the 
Reformers concerning fallen nature. Poulet says (p. 10):

     For them, too, both man and nature were divinely 
     animated. For them also there had been a time when 
     nature and man had participated in the creative power. . . . 
     But that time existed for them no longer. The time when 
     nature was divine was now succeeded by the time of 
     fallen nature; fallen by its own fault, by the free act in 
     consequence of which it had separated itself from its