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Theological Consequences In King Lear Essay, Research Paper

Theological Consequences in King Lear

Shakespeare’s King Lear is not primarily a theological text. It contains no direct references to Christ, and its characters are not overtly religious, except perhaps in a strictly pagan sense. King Lear is, however, a play that seeks out the “meaning” of life, a play that attempts to come to terms with life’s pain; or, rather, plummets the reader into such a storm of chaos and meaninglessness that any preconceived meaningful assumptions must necessarily be challenged. At the time in which Shakespeare wrote, amidst the recent activity of the Reformation, the assumptions the general public took into a theater were varied, but, more often than not, within some context of Christian thought. As Shakespeare was undoubtedly aware, interpretation of the play would necessarily be set in Christian context. (Even anti-Christian interpretation would be considered to be a Christian context in that it is reactionary.) The question arises as to whether or not Shakespeare, intentionally or not, has emphasized one strain of Christian thought while denouncing another? Or, in this play without any obvious redemption, has Shakespeare denounced Christianity altogether? I do not think he has gone to this extreme, but has instead challenged Christian interpretation as a whole. As we shall see, the distinction between Christianity and Christian interpretation is crucial.

For my premise that Shakespeare and his audience were in some way effected by the Christian thought of the day, I am indebted to Stephen Lynch, who has researched the evidence for this position in a chapter from his Shakespearean Intertextualities entitled “English Reformations in King Leir and King Lear.” Within the chapter, Lynch explores possibilities in theological interpretations of the play in light of its predecessor King Leir. It is Lynch’s contention that Shakespeare’s Lear is reactionary to certain Calvinistic implications communicated in Leir. Shakespeare’s negation of Leir’s theological values are not, however, a necessary affirmation of a different theological stance. It might be the foundation of a new theological view, or it could be an utter negation from which, to quote the King himself, “Nothing can come of nothing”(1.82). The question of what truly follows from “nothing” is at the heart of King Lear. Can any good issue from the apparently needless suffering that a character like Lear is forced to endure? Lynch, in the end, seems unsure: ” if the play moves toward redemption, it is not the absolute and certain redemption of the old play, but an incremental, unsteady, and indeterminate redemption”(56). If there is any redemptive value to be found in the play, according to Lynch, it comes about only through the very internalized purgatorial suffering of its characters. In the original Leir play, though, redemption was always regained through grace and divine acts of providence. Hence, ready-made acts of religious piety were honored instead of any transformative experience of religious suffering. Even if Shakespeare’s version is not truly redemptive, it serves as at least an indictment against the earlier view that largely ignored the harsh reality of suffering.

The reality of the actual experience of suffering is also given great importance in a 1986 article by James L. Calderwood entitled “Creative Uncreation in King Lear.” Rarely in his essay does Calderwood directly confront the different theological analyses of the play, but then it is more effective that he does not. The point that Calderwood does make has immediate implications upon theology. Also, an excess of discussion would belabor the point he makes, for, in a sense, an excess of discussion is what he is rallying against. The pain and suffering of the play, Calderwood argues, is caused by a confusion in the convention of language. This confusion lies in the difference between “what is” and “what is said.” The difference between the two is perhaps best exemplified in Edgar’s saying, “Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’? / I am worse than e’er I was. / And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’”(4.1, 25-28). Language, for Calderwood, is merely a cushion that shelters us from the harshness of reality. And, as the convention is grows more sophisticated an awareness of the reality may be lost. There comes a time “[w]hen a culture reaches the point where reality has been definitively charted – when fluid forms have petrified into institutions, and live meanings have deadened into clich s”(6).

Further, Shakespeare, who was a playwright and used language as his medium, must have been aware of this confusion. As a critic well aware of the relationship between meaning and its conventional context, Calderwood shows obvious deconstructionist tendencies. Here, though, he opts not to deconstruct but instead to show how Shakespeare already has. The play operates under a process of “uncreation,” where everything that is “something” moves towards “nothing,” “requiring us to return with [Shakespeare] to a point of creative origin, the unshaped, meaningless stuff with which he began” (8). King Lear is a play in which Shakespeare is acutely aware of the inadequacies of his medium, thus explaining the irresolution of its complicated ending: to deliver us to the “immediate, uninterpreted experience” of suffering unbuffered by constraints of language.

Towards the end of his essay, Calderwood goes on to admit, “Despite the intensity of his concern for immediacy in King Lear, his play remains unavoidably a saying – not the agonizing ‘it is’ itself but a mediated representation of the worst”(18). With this in mind, one theological implication may follow from Calderwood’s interpretation. Lear may be

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