Religion in King Lear - Essay Example

Religion in King Lear King Lear is set in a pre-Christian era. Religious references abound in the play, but it would be a difficult task to find a coherent theology amongst them. One of the most revealing moments is where Gloucester believes he is about to fall to his death, and says farewell to his companion, who he does not know is his son, giving him his purse, saying “Fairies and Gods/ Prosper it with thee” (IV, 6, 29-30). The chaotic mixture of fairies with Gods seems to characterize the religious confusion in the play. Characters endlessly invoke Gods, divine powers, and mystical forces; there seems to be an assumption that something governs our lives on earth, but the direction of the play as a whole is towards a radical questioning of this whole idea. When Gloucester says As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ Gods; They kill us for their sport (IV, 1, 36-7). his view will not do here as a summary of the world shown in the play, for one thing because there simply is no evidence of Gods doing anything at all, callous or benevolent. In Act V Edgar comments on his father’s fate in terms which again assume some sort of divine order in things: The Gods are just, and if our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us: The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes (V, 3, 170-3). We ought to remember that it was Gloucester’s compassion, not his viciousness, that led directly to his maiming. More questionable surely is the claim that “the Gods are just”, for surely the whole play works against any such certainty. The ultimate and massive denial of such faith surely comes a few lines later: Albany: The Gods defend her! Bear him hence awhile (Re-enter Lear, with Cordelia dead in his arms) (V, 1, 255-6). The Gods clearly do not defend anyone – which is, in brief, the answer to the question “Why does Cordelia die?” It is the ultimate cruelty in a cruel play. The worst can, and does, happen. As Jan Kott noted in the 1960s, comparing King Lear to the work of Beckett, “In Shakespeare’s play there is neither Christian heaven, nor the heaven predicted by humanists. King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies” (Kott, 1967, p.116). It is a world without justice, nor any convincing sense of meaningful moral order. The characters assume, however, that the divine is present in their world, and that it can be addressed and appealed to, though it comes in many forms. Lear begs “sweet heaven” (I, 1, 46) to prevent him from going mad. He prays for “all the stor’d vengeances of Heaven” (II, 4, 163) to strike down his ungrateful daughter, and begs the “Heavens” (II, 4, 273) to give him patience and strength. “O Heavens, / If you do love old men” (II, 4 191-2), he says in the same scene. In the storm scenes Kent’s description of its peculiar severity prompts one to see it as more than just a physical event. He has never in his life seen “such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder” etc., and the implication is that the storm has more than natural causes. This leads Lear to his reflection on the power of the storm to purge evil and crime: Let the Great Gods, That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads, Find out their enemies now…(III, 2, 49). He believes the Gods are present and that they have the power to punish wrongs – even his own. In III, 4 he acknowledges his own responsibility for how Goneril and Regan are: “Judicious punishment! ’twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters” (III, 4, 75-6). Gloucester too believes in the divine, but in very muddled way. His son Edmund feels none of the strength of the spiritual, and despises his father for his naivety: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound (I, 2, 1-2). means, in fact, that he has no gods or goddesses, that religious sense to him is bosh, and a sign of superstitious weakness in others. His closeness to the sisters is clear. His “Nature”, it is obvious, is a different concept from that assumed in Cordelia’s definition in I, 1 of the natural “bonds” of feeling and duty which underlie decent society. It is, for him, nature as expressed in the law of the jungle – naked self-interest and the pursuit of power. Gloucester’s parting speech, about eclipses and their effect on the bonds of men (I, 2, 107-120), is not so much superstitious as old-fashioned. It is an attempt to give a sort of religious explanation – at least a supernatural explanation – for the problem of evil in the world. It is inadequate, clearly, as an account of men’s failing in their bonds, but then so is Edmund’s subsequent satire on his doddery father’s beliefs and reverences (I, 2, 124-140). In fact Edmund does not offer an explanation. He simply says that it is stupid escapism to “make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars” (I, 2, 126-7). They have contrasting views of what is natural, but all Edmund can say on the matter is, “I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising” (I, 2, 138-9). The question remains, and it is at the heart of the play: what makes men fail in their bonds? The play actually offers no explanation. Evil, Shakespeare sees, is a mystery, and part of a larger mystery of the nature of man. All he can offer is ideas on what to do about it, or at least how to live with it. A.C.Bradley asked “Should we not be… near the truth if we called this poem The Redemption of King Lear” (Bradley, 235), and in the sense that the play follows Lear’s movement from egotistic folly to the wisdom of humility Bradley was right, though his choice of the word “redemption” indicates a religious, even Christian, interpretation of Lear’s story. There is some justification for this. Kent tells Lear that he is doing evil (I, 1, 166) at the beginning of the play. His boorish behavior, and his invocation of dark forces proves Kent right. Shakespeare’s audience would have had no problem in interpreting his prayer to Nature in I, 3, which would have meant more to them than it does to us: Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up in her the organs of increase…(I, 4, 285-8). It is clearly enough an odd thing to ask any sane concept of the divine identity of Nature to perform – to frustrate the natural process. It is indeed a devilish prayer, which Shakespeare’s original audience would have seen as a direct invocation of evil forces. Lady Macbeth, unquestionably invoking the devil, speaks in very similar terms. The storm scenes, though, teach him a new understanding of the human world, one that in his arrogance he has ignored for years. In his deranged state he seeks for justice against human cruelty. The last heath scene (III, 6) centers on the mock trial of the sisters. The symbolic force of this is evident: (To Edgar) Thou, robed man of justice, take thy place. (To the Fool) And thou, his yoke fellow of equity, Bench by his side. (To Kent) You are o’th’commission; Sit you too (III, 6, 37-40). Here is a Christian inversion of the social order; a mad beggar, a fool, and an exiled man are set up over the mighty to sit in judgement on them. It is a mad fancy of Lear’s, but it has a deep significance in the criticism of false sophistication that the play poses. An unjust society has helped Lear to be an egotist and to do evil, as Kent said. Now Lear is learning and regrets his own “sophistication” in the face of Edgar, “the thing itself”. What he is learning is the need for humility, and respect for others, and the importance of setting one’s eyes on the real truths of human existence if one is to live decently and with meaning. His return to Cordelia takes on something of a religious quality. By IV,4 Cordelia has become almost a symbolic figure. She is united with that benevolent nature that the evil people attempt to frustrate, in the work of healing the sick Lear. All bless’d secrets, All you unpublish’d virtues of the earth, Spring with my tears” (IV, 4, 15-17). Her tears and the goodness of the healing earth combine. This conception of nature is the very opposite of Edmund’s jungle. When father and daughter are reunited in IV, 7, we see a ceremonial or symbolic scene, of an immense seriousness. We feel we are dealing here with the well-springs of human life. Cordelia is a power, the force of humane feeling. Lear awakes from sleep, symbolically reborn as a new man with the knowledge of hell within him, to see the daughter whose love he scorned. For a moment he believes he has died, and is now in an after life. His awareness of his own guilt and probable damnation is expressed in the majestic language of resignation: You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave; Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead (IV, 7, 45-8). As he comes to realisation of where he is, it is clear that all his assertive egotism, and his melodramatic display are gone. He is unassuming, humble and tentative. When he recognises Cordelia, there is only one perfect gesture he can make to mark his knowledge of his massive responsibility, a religious one; he kneels to her. Gloucester learns other truths, which can hardly be called religious. His agony is worse in some ways than Lear’s, in that Gloucester never loses awareness as Lear does by his collapse into madness. As the critic H.A.Mason says “I suggest that through him we grasp the central thread, which has to do with love and suffering and sticking it out to the end… Lear is spared the worst. Gloucester gets it” (Mason, 1970, p.200). He determines on suicide; he has been pushed so far that even he feels the wish to escape. In IV, 6 Edgar’s trick is intended to educate Gloucester into a realisation that the only reasonable and responsible human course is not to escape from trouble but to put up with it, and thus to rise above it. That the already heroic (if that is the right word) Gloucester needs this lesson is proof both of his humanity and of the magnitude of suffering he has gone through. If Shakespeare is exploring how men should react to the worst in this play, this scene surely drives Gloucester as far as a man can possibly go. And even at the end Shakespeare seems to offer no reassurance other than the dignity that a man gains by continuing to “bear free and patient thoughts” (IV, 6, 80). It is an odd and grotesque scene, with Gloucester blessing Edgar, who of course hears him, as his last wish on earth, and then falling flat on his face. It has a flavour of that sardonic cruel laughter of the earlier part of the play. But Edgar explains to the audience: “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it” (IV, 6, 33-4) and goes on to show Gloucester that he has been saved by divine intervention from the fiend who tempted him to suicide. We recall Edgar’s own realisation: “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.”(IV, 1, 27-8). It was a devil who tempted Gloucester, but we might prefer to call it despair. He learns his lesson and immediately sees the truth. henceforth I’ll bear Affliction till it do cry out itself ‘Enough, enough,’ and die (IV, 6, 75-7). King Lear is surely about the human consequences of the absence of the Gods from the world. The eighteenth century could not tolerate the ending of the play, in which, after all, Cordelia still dies. Dr Johnson commented that Shakespeare “sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose, for he that thinks reasonably must think morally… (and) he makes no just distribution of good and evil” (Johnson, 1968, Vol. 7, p.71), and so the end was rewritten. And although we may smile at the absurdity of changing the ending of a Shakespeare play, we can surely understand Johnson’s point. In many ways the ultimate godlessness of the play, for all its references to gods, is more in tune with our own disturbed and materialistic age than Johnson’s. Lear may be redeemed, and receive a sort of Christian forgiveness, but there is no happy ending for him. The bad people all die, but so do Gloucester and Cordelia. The only lesson we can take from the world is Edgar’s rather bleak, but perhaps heroic view that Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all (V, 2, 9-11). Works Cited References to the text are from Muir, Kenneth, ed. King Lear, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1972. Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan, Second edition, 1905. Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski, London, Methuen, 2nd edition 1967. Mason, H.A., Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love, London, Chatto and Windus, 1970. Sherbo, Arthur, ed. The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vols.7 and 8, New Haven and London, Yale U.P., 1968. Read More