Chapters 5 and 6 will focus upon two tragedies, King Lear and Macbeth. These plays are closely linked through their transformations of native legend and their representations of warlike, aristocratic societies. Both raise haunting problems about the agency of spirits, invite us to imagine evil on a demonic scale, and take us well over the edge of civilization into barbarism and savagery. In Naomi Conn Liebler's view, both “interrogate virtually every kind of human interrelatedness and definition of identity: feudal, familial, spousal, national.” Shakespeare has created tragic plots in which specific interactions by specific individuals prove terribly destructive precisely because they seem always to have worked, to have been validated by customary wisdom and tradition. Hence these plays can rend the hearts and minds of spectators who expect either confirmation or subversion of social arrangements.

But King Lear and Macbeth also differ profoundly in respects which a study of dependent relations may attempt to clarify. King Lear features outcasts who need and respect civilized order. A succession of characters who follow Cordelia in being thrust from place and position also follow her when they value appropriate bonds and obligations. Moreover, they do not venture far from their collective life or the physical structures which protect it. Even Edgar, proclaimed an “outlaw” to his father's “blood” and prepared for dangerous exposure in the wild, quickly joins the group of characters shut out of Gloucester's house and follows his father back into a more domestic space.