3.1 Introduction

The relationship between the Old Testament and the New has always been and continues to be a problem for Christians. One of the earliest and most important controversies in the early church was over this exact issue. In the middle of the second century, a very determined and influential reformer, Marcion, claimed that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was a judgmental, legalistic, narrow-minded God, who, if not downright evil, was clearly petty and misguided, and so was anyone so foolish as to worship and follow such a God. ⁽¹⁾ This Hebrew God could not be the same one as the God proclaimed by Jesus, who is the God of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Marcion therefore rejected the Hebrew Scriptures entirely. He did not regard them as the Old Testament, since for him they had no relation to Christian Scriptures. The only New Testament writings he allowed as Scripture for his churches were the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul (all those attributed to Paul, with the exceptions of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), and his version of even these writings expurgated all references to the Hebrew Bible. What is especially ironic and interesting in this controversy is that it was Marcion (later declared a heretic) who forced the rest of the Christian church to declare what exactly they thought should be considered Scripture, a question that had been left open until then. It was the claims of Marcion's rival group that resulted in the rest of Christianity canonizing the Old and New Testaments as we now have them, ⁽²⁾ a good illustration of the value of debate and disagreement: "Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another" (Prov 27:17). A rival group that explicitly rejected the Old Testament forced the church to take a stand specifically affirming it as authoritative Scripture.

But although the church in the second century and ever since has always affirmed the value and authority of the Old Testament, this has also not been without its problems. The title itself seems to many not as respectful as "Hebrew Scriptures," resulting in some Christians now using Hebrew/Greek Scriptures or First/Second Testaments, instead of Old and New Testaments, when referring to the two parts of our Bible. While sharing their sensitivity, I still believe the labels Old and New can be used accurately, more accurately than the suggested substitutions, to describe the place and role of the books in a Christian Bible. If "old" is taken to mean "obsolete," either in reference to the Jewish religion or its Scriptures which have been taken over into Christianity, then we should be educated about the label rather than change it: "Many times, Christians, in the name of the Gospel of Jesus, have labeled the Jews as rejected by God and part of an old and replaced religious faith." This is to be virtually a Marcionite, just with some less consistency than he himself displayed, keeping as Scripture books for which one has little use, and to which one gives little authority. This is, however, a common enough position among Christians. Every semester I hear several students give a completely Marcionite description of the Old and New Testaments and their respective Gods, and from the way they speak, it is clearly not something they've just come up with on the spot, but a description they have heard frequently enough before that they repeat it now as truth or orthodoxy. The use of Old and New Testament can be appropriate if the two labels are used to stress and highlight the continuity between the two parts of our Bible, insisting upon the incompleteness of the Old (for Christians), at the same time as it insists that the New Testament needs the Old as a foundation: "Christians believe that God has spoken through Christ a new and fuller word than the Old Testament alone contains. But this is so only because it adds a fuller dimension to the primary word that God had already spoken to Israel." ⁽³⁾

So as Christians we must guard against Marcion's rejection of the Old Testament, as well as the idea that the New Testament replaces or supersedes the Old. Instead, the authentic and most helpful Christian use of the Old Testament is to see that the New Testament continues the Old. But this sense of continuity has also been open to interpretation - though we should note that, as in the case of Marcion, a diversity of opinion and interpretation within Christianity is a problematic, but not necessarily bad thing, for it is the very dynamic that fuels change and growth within the church, as painful as that may be at times. Allowing for generalizations and exceptions, New Testament books like Matthew and James seem to stress a continuity of similarity or identity between Jesus' message and that of the Old Testament, or between Jesus himself and Old Testament heroes like David, Moses, and Jeremiah. Paul and Luke, on the other hand, seem mostly concerned with showing the change within continuity: with Jesus' death and resurrection, something new has occurred that no one expected, but it's a new world that continues the old and cannot be understood apart from it. Let us call these two ways of continuing the Old Testament message application and adaptation, respectively: application sees the past reflected in the present, while adaptation sees the connection between past and present as more indirect. These dynamics do not apply only to the New Testament's use of the Old, but to all subsequent use of either Testament by believers, where both application and adaptation are necessary for making the Scriptures vital and relevant to people's lives. Even non-believers would grant that there are times when the Biblical commandments against murder, adultery, theft, and lying (Exod 20:13-16; Deut 5:17-20) should be applied directly, with no interpretation necessary or desirable. But in a world where few of us fall down before idols made of stone or wood, but we routinely put money, sex, and power ahead of our relation with God, the Biblical prohibition on idolatry (Exod 20:4-6; Deut 5:8-10) may be in need of adaptation or extension in order to be applicable to our lives.

The processes of both application and adaptation can be seen in how the New Testament writers take over the Old Testament idea of Wisdom into their new works. We turn now to examine how different New Testament authors, especially Paul, continue the Wisdom tradition in their own ways, preserving it at the same time as they add their own unique contributions.

3.2 Wisdom and Folly in the New Testament

Throughout the New Testament, the words for "wisdom," "wise," "wisely," or "make wise" are most often used in the same positive ways as their Hebrew equivalents were used in the Old Testament. They are applied to Jesus, ⁽⁴⁾ to God, ⁽⁵⁾ and to his faithful followers. ⁽⁶⁾ Most of the New Testament applies the Old Testament idea of Divine and human Wisdom directly to the present situation as a positive attribute to be admired and pursued. In the case of God, Wisdom is a Divine attribute that shows God's vast superiority as Creator; in the case of humans, Wisdom is a God-given gift of insight and discernment that renders people enlightened and better able to serve God.

But alongside this uniformly positive portrayal of Wisdom, there are dissenting or qualifying voices, writings that adapt the Old Testament concept of Wisdom rather than apply it directly. Sometimes this is a criticism of someone or something that seems "wise," but is not so in reality: ⁽⁷⁾ there is apparent wisdom, and real wisdom. Sometimes this contrast is made more pointed, in which there is not just a mistake of judging something as wise that isn't, but a real conflict between two different kinds of wisdom, an earthly one and a heavenly one: "This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity" (Jas 3:15-17). And more surprisingly, in what is regarded by many as the earliest gospel tradition about Jesus, the sayings common to Matthew and Luke (the so-called Q source), ⁽⁸⁾ a tradition that several times depicts Jesus as a teacher of Wisdom, ⁽⁹⁾ there is a saying that makes the contrast not between two competing kinds of wisdom, but between wisdom and simplicity or childishness: "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes" (Matt 11:25 // Luke 10:21). Alongside the conventional idea of wisdom, some New Testament writings formulated an implacable conflict between differing kinds of wisdom, and the superior kind was identified with people who are normally thought of as the opposite of "wise" - people who are simple, unsophisticated, weak, and vulnerable.

Although Paul can speak of wisdom in the same positive way as other New Testament writers, it is this contrast between conflicting kinds of wisdom that his theological creativity really worked through in his Corinthian correspondence. Faced with a cosmopolitan, worldly congregation steeped in Greek culture, philosophy, and religion, Paul's language and the issues he addresses are markedly different from his other epistles. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Though less explicitly theological than Romans or Galatians, the Corinthian letters are just as fundamental to Paul's message of Christianity, as they constantly return to the radical reconfiguration in human life and relationships that has been brought about by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As Paul is trying to impress upon his Corinthian audience the unexpected demands and outlook of their new life in Christ, he launches into an impassioned paragraph that goes to the heart of his Gospel, putting it in terms of a paradoxical new wisdom and folly that defy expectations:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are

being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom

of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart." Where is the wise

man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made

foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world

did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we

preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek

wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to

Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of

God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and

the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor 1:18-25)

Wisdom in either the Old Testament or the Greek world implies and promises a life of success and respect, not a miserable, shameful death on a cross. If the Corinthians (or us) are to follow a crucified Christ, they must cast off their old ideas of wisdom and accept a Divine Wisdom that is foolishness by worldly standards, for it is a Wisdom that came down to us in the One Who suffered, served, and died for others in weakness and humility.

Perhaps even harder to accept are the implications that this Divine Wisdom has for its devotees, which Paul turns to in the verses following. Just as God did not choose a conventional king or sage as His Son, so too the followers of this foolishness are not those who are normally valued or respected in their world (or ours): "For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise . . . God chose what is low and despised in the world" (1 Cor 1:26-28). To follow a God who is so foolish as to die for His creation, or to follow the penniless, illegitimate son of a Jewish peasant girl, is to bring upon oneself a similar life of service, weakness, and ridicule, as Paul demonstrates in his own life: "And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom" (1 Cor 2:3-4). About a year later, Paul finally explodes in anger against the Corinthians' intransigence or relapse into their old ways, and gives a "fool's speech," in which he sarcastically defends himself by boasting of the same respectable, but worthless and un-Godly qualities as his opponents claim. He then turns to boast of the really important, legitimating parts of his ministry - his humiliating sufferings, concluding with a statement of what really qualifies him as an apostle, or what would qualify his readers as Christians, if they could allow such folly into their own lives: "If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness" (2 Cor 11:30). We are all weak before God and others: Paul only teaches his followers the Wisdom of admitting, accepting, and building on this weakness, for such Wisdom is the only real way to overcome our weakness.

Whereas older Wisdom literature offered a lifestyle that would minimize or avoid suffering, and later Wisdom such as Job tried to provide some kind of answer or context for it, Paul offered the Corinthians a Divine Wisdom that embraced suffering and demanded it of Her followers. This must have been as hard a demand for them as it is for us, but the alternatives are ultimately less attractive, for they only deny and postpone the inevitable, clinging to empty, fleeting dreams as if they were eternal: "Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away" (1 Cor 2:6). In a world where six of the Seven Wonders of the World exist only in our imagination, the Eternal City was sacked and burned sixteen centuries ago, and the Thousand Year Reich lasted 12 years, who would deny that the foolishness of God might well be a good deal more powerful and wise than anything we have offer to ourselves? (Indeed, let us hope that it is, as the longevity of our supposedly eternal accomplishments seems to be shrinking steadily.) But the temptations to cling to earthly things and to avoid the inevitability of suffering are powerful indeed (they are usually called "wise"), as we will see in King Lear.

3.3 Overview of King Lear

Like most of the books we are considering, King Lear by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is amazingly simple in its outline: an old king unwisely divides his kingdom between his two evil daughters while disowning his good daughter, and the two evil daughters destroy him, their sister, and each other. Its complexities and profundities do not lie in its plot, or even in its characterizations, the two places modern audiences would usually look for understanding. In its setup, plot, and characterizations, everything about the play is archetypal, like a fairy tale: its two wicked and one good daughter have always suggested to audiences and critics the Cinderella story. ⁽¹¹⁾ I think the play's genius is in two other qualities it has in abundance. First is its placing of such archetypal characters into scenes of shattering dramatic power and violence, cataclysms that are apocalyptic in their scope and overtones - the first explosive scene of Lear's tantrum, the world-shattering storm, the mock trial presided over by fools and madmen, the sadistic eye-gouging, the heart-rending death scene: even on the page these leave an indelible impression. And second are the poetic speeches given by almost every character as they share with us their deepest feelings and thoughts about the unfolding apocalypse: no one can read or hear these lines without pausing to consider them long and hard.

The play opens with Lear, the king of Britain, at the height of his power, and the depth of his folly. He comes forward in a very public spectacle before the wedding of his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and announces that he will divide his kingdom between his three daughters. Even more shocking, he proposes to base the division of the kingdom upon their public protestations of their love for him. His two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, give empty, hyperbolic speeches, and receive their rewards immediately, before Cordelia speaks. (I.e., the scene is only for show, it's not really a contest at all: it didn't matter what Goneril and Regan said, because the prizes were awarded before all "contestants" participated). When Lear turns to Cordelia, however, she first refuses to answer, then gives a very cold and detached statement of her love: "I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less" (I.i.92-93). Lear explodes, dividing her part of the kingdom between the other two, and giving her to the King of France without a dowry. When Lear's faithful servant Kent tries to defend Cordelia, Lear banishes him from the kingdom.

Lear proposes to live alternately in the castles of Goneril and Regan, keeping a retinue of one hundred knights at his disposal. While at Goneril's castle, he is rejoined by a disguised Kent, whom he takes on as a follower. We also meet there his Fool, a character who can tell Lear things much more unpleasant than Cordelia and Kent tried to in the first scene, but in a way that he can get away with it, and, more importantly, in a way that renders Lear capable of listening:

LEAR Dost thou call me fool, boy?

FOOL All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou

wast born with. . . .

. . . Now thou art an O without a

figure. I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, thou

art nothing. (I.iv.141-43, 183-85)

Just a few lines earlier, Lear was incapable of tolerating Kent and Cordelia when they respectfully referred to him as "father," "king," and "majesty," while the Fool's role allows him to call Lear a "fool" and "nothing," as well as numerous other names, most all of which seem to imply a playful disrespect: "nuncle" (I.iv. 111, 125, 148, 163, and passim), "shealed peascod" (I.iv.190), "hedge-sparrow" (I.iv.206), "Jug" (I.iv.215), and "Lear's shadow" (I.iv.221). Goneril's assessment of the Fool as "all-licensed" (I.iv.191) is quite accurate.

But while at Goneril's, we find that there is nothing at all playful in the disrespect that she shows to her father. She objects that his retinue is "disordered . . . deboshed and bold" (I.iv.232), and dismisses half of them without Lear's knowledge. Lear flies into another rage and leaves for Regan's castle. Regan, however, is warned of his approach by Goneril, and leaves her castle with her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, so that they're not home when Lear arrives. Lear's company, Regan, Cornwall, and Goneril all meet at the castle of the Earl of Gloucester, where the two daughters subject Lear to the final humiliation: they tell him that they will not let him into either of their homes with even one follower of his own. He must live the end of his life alone, friendless, with not one vestige of his former life left to him, with not even the smallest, cheering illusion about who is now in charge. Lear prefers the elements to their hospitality, and he leaves with Kent and the Fool, going out into a storm more savage than any Kent can remember (III.ii.45-49), while Goneril and Regan tell Gloucester to lock the doors to keep them out. They wander around, Lear raging against what has happened to him, until Kent finds them a hovel for shelter, in which they find a partly-naked madman.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare has constructed a parallel plot about Gloucester and his children. Gloucester has a legitimate son, Edgar, and an illegitimate son, Edmund. (Surely every generation experiences anew the frustration of the similarity of their names. I can only offer my own pathetic mnemonic device: Edgar is the good son, and his name has a "g" in it: "g" is for "good." Laugh if you must.) Edmund conceives a plan to trick his father into thinking that Edgar is going to try to kill Gloucester, hoping thereby to inherit, though totally willing to improvise as the situation unfolds. Gloucester falls for the deception, while Edmund simultaneously tricks his half-brother into fleeing, thereby making the accusations seem all the more likely. Edgar is alone in the wilderness and he assumes the disguise of a madman to protect himself: he is the one whom Lear, the Fool, and Kent find in the hovel, and for the rest of the play their plots are intertwined. Gloucester finds them, gives them shelter, and sends Lear to Dover to meet up with a French army led by Cordelia, while Edgar again wanders off into the wilderness, still in disguise. Edmund gives this information to Cornwall, who rewards him by giving him all of Gloucester's lands. Cornwall then gouges out both of Gloucester's eyes before being killed by a servant who objects to the torture. Gloucester is left to wander helplessly outside, where Edgar sees him and helps him. Gloucester intends suicide, so Edgar tells him he has led him to the top of a cliff, when in reality they are on a plain, so when Gloucester throws himself forward, he is unhurt. Edgar then pretends to be another bystander at the bottom of the cliff, who saw Gloucester float down like a feather. Gloucester's "miraculous" salvation convinces him not to attempt suicide again.

As they are speaking, Lear enters, having gone mad because of what Goneril and Regan did to him, but more so because of what he did to Cordelia: "A sovereign shame so elbows him; . . . / . . . - these things sting / His mind so venomously that burning shame / Detains him from Cordelia" (IV.iii.42, 45-47). Lear is eventually reunited with Cordelia, while Edgar defends his father from Goneril's evil servant Oswald, killing him. The forces of good appear to be winning, and the forces of evil under Goneril, Regan, and Edmund are rapidly unraveling, as both women lust after Edmund and are in deadly competition over him. However, they have managed to raise an army to repulse the French force, and in the ensuing battle between the French and British forces, Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner by Edmund, who orders them executed (V.iii.254 makes it sound like only Cordelia was to be executed, while in V.i.67-68 it sounds like both were to be executed). In a duel Edgar mortally wounds Edmund, who, before he dies, sends a messenger to save Lear and Cordelia from execution. At the same time, Goneril poisons Regan, then kills herself. Again the tide seems to have turned in favor of the good characters. But Edgar relates how his father died when Edgar finally revealed himself to him, and then Lear enters, carrying the body of Cordelia. It is an image of desecration and destruction so complete and irrevocable that it overwhelms the three surviving characters:

KENT Is this the promised end?

EDGAR Or image of that horror?

ALBANY Fall and cease.

Kent is hopeless, Edgar is resigned, Albany is overcome, and none of them can console Lear or one another. Lear tells us that he killed the evil servant who had killed Cordelia, then the king himself dies a few lines later. Kent expresses his intention to die soon (suicide?), Albany abdicates his power, and Edgar is left to carry on, providing his own commentary on the situation that relates it back to the first scene (at which he was not present): "The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" (V.iii.324-35). ⁽¹²⁾ We have watched in horror as two families and a kingdom have been destroyed as they struggled to learn the value of this statement.

It is the play's overwhelmingly apocalyptic and bleak imagery, action, and especially ending that lead many to deny its Christianity entirely. Harold Bloom scoffs at "Christianizers of this pagan play" ⁽¹³⁾ and their "irrelevant transcendental moralizings," ⁽¹⁴⁾ and finally dismisses all such claptrap: "That pretty much makes Christianity as irrelevant to Macbeth as it is to King Lear, and indeed to all the Shakespearean tragedies." ⁽¹⁵⁾ This is true only if one believes that a play to which Christianity was relevant would necessarily have a happy ending, as though Christians cannot be anguished, or cannot portray a Christian response and meaning to anguish on the stage. Such a caricature may well be true for Shakespeare's predecessors on which he based his play: I completely agree that "nowhere in Shakespeare's play is there the sentimentalized Christianity so characteristic of its predecessor," ⁽¹⁶⁾ Shakespeare having abandoned sentimentality for "complexity, ambiguity, and dubiety." ⁽¹⁷⁾ But unless these latter qualities are considered un-Christian, I see nothing to diminish the relevance of Christianity to the play, and some Christians of not inconsiderable faith and influence have been capable of a good deal of doubt or even despair: "One notes that Pascal and Kierkegaard thought of themselves as Christians." ⁽¹⁸⁾ Never mind the more obvious case of the Book of Job, to which we will turn in the next chapter, the Scriptures and subsequent Christian literature include numerous examples of unanswered prayers and shameful deaths and disappointments: "In the Psalms, and even in the Epistles, our deliverance is often an object of faith and hope but sometimes emphatically not of experience. You may repent and confess and obtain forgiveness and learn patience and reassume your proper place in the world, and still things may not turn out well. Cordelia may die." ⁽¹⁹⁾ Such tragedy is not antithetical or even peripheral to Christianity, it is at its very heart: "Like Job, King Lear is part of this Wisdom Literature tradition. . . . Tragedy is Wisdom Literature dramatized." ⁽²⁰⁾

Put another way, it seems very odd to suggest that the play's apocalyptic tone renders it un-Christian, when Christianity began as an apocalyptic sect and maintains at least the vestiges of its origins. The Gospel of Mark, regarded by most as the earliest gospel, probably did not originally contain an account of the resurrection, ⁽²¹⁾ and therefore ends as bleakly as anything in Shakespeare. But perhaps the intervening centuries have rendered "sentimentalized Christianity" so commonplace, and apocalyptic Christianity so weird and primitive, that a play more closely identified with the latter is no longer recognizable to us as Christian. Christianity (or any apocalyptic worldview) believes in redemption, but denies that final redemption is possible or even compatible with the way the world is now: "On this side of eternity, there are at best fleeting though magnificent moments of glad grace, such as the one we witness between Lear and Cordelia. . . . such moments . . . are finally unworldly, in the world but not of it." ⁽²²⁾ The play is inescapably nightmarish, but it is an undeniably Christian nightmare: "In King Lear, then, we encounter what Carl Jung calls 'the dark side of the Apocalypse,' with Shakespeare, like Jung, seeming to feel that the New Testament Apocalypse, having already produced 'a universal religious nightmare,' is an encounter with essential human experience - is as much the province of poets and dramatists as of theologians and historians." ⁽²³⁾

Not surprisingly, the play is from Shakespeare's dramatic maturity and the height of his genius, probably first performed in 1605, the year after Othello and the year before Macbeth. But comparison with those two plays and with the slightly earlier Hamlet (1601) shows the different challenges presented to us by King Lear. The heroes in the other tragedies are enormously appealing - ambitious, successful, decisive (in the case of Othello and Macbeth), or thoughtful (in the case of Hamlet). They are paradigms of Aristotelian tragic heroes - great men with just one fatal flaw, one that throughout the play we are eager to forgive or overlook, or which we desperately hope they will fix before it's too late. But it is very hard indeed to call Lear appealing, as Shakespeare seems to go out of his way in the first two acts to make him as unappealing as possible: in the first scene alone he shows such loathsome qualities as "wicked pride, self-will, self-love, vanity, choler, egoism, senile puerility, a crass materialism which views love as a commodity to be bartered and traded, tyranny, sloth, and want of courage" ⁽²⁴⁾ - a potent, shocking litany of shortcomings indeed; and when he is later laid low, he turns into a miserable, bitter, complaining, spiteful, self-pitying old man. While the observation that Lear is deeply loved by all the good characters in the play certainly needs to be taken into consideration, ⁽²⁵⁾ it cannot check our distaste for him, though it may put it in some larger context; their steadfast love for him seems, rather, to put the other characters who love such a miserable old man in a better light, but not him.

Further, while it's so abundantly clear what is wrong with Lear, where is his greatness? He's too old to have Hamlet's vitality and potential, but he could have at least the memory of the kind of martial virtue of Macbeth or Othello. Did he win battles, vanquish foes, build great palaces or castles, govern wisely and make the people happy? (He certainly doesn't seem to have done much of a job raising his family, so if we are to find any greatness, it would seem to have to be in the public, political realm.) It's certainly possible, but there is absolutely nothing in the play to indicate this, and his anguish in Act III - the beginning of his descent into madness and revelation - makes it sound like there were some serious problems in his reign and in his life:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just. (III.iv.28-36)

Apparently his reign left something to be desired. (And, more importantly for him as a person, we have before us on stage an eighty year old man who seems to be thinking of the misfortunes of others for the first time in his life: there is the real tragedy.) This is why modern re-tellings of the story sometimes seek to make the king more bloodthirsty and successful, in order to make him more appealing; it also makes his downfall seem more just, as punishment for past violence, rather than an unraveling of a faulty, misguided life. Director Akira Kurosawa does this brilliantly in his film Ran, in which the Lear character seems to be combined with Macbeth: he is a savage and successful warrior who tries ineffectually to stop the violence now that he is on top, but is dogged by the demons of his bloody past. (The aged king even gets to kill one of the wicked servants who is menacing his fool early in the movie.) All this is fine as new art, but it is not the image or meaning of Shakespeare's King Lear, which works in a different way than other tragedies. It works by having a hero who is so ordinary and unexceptional: not in rank and wealth, to be sure, but in the more important qualities of his personal and emotional state. ⁽²⁶⁾ Lear is weak and frail in a way that Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth are not, nor are Oedipus and Orestes. In this respect, at least, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman may have made the same point as Lear more than others have. It is crucial for this tragedy that we see someone like us realize and be destroyed by the mistakes of his life, mistakes that are not enormous crimes like other tragic heroes (parricide, matricide, regicide, wife murdering, incest), but fairly mundane actions of being insensitive to others, especially those dearest to you. ⁽²⁷⁾ King Lear seems all too familiar, in a way that Bloom quite rightly describes as making us feel "uncomfortably at home." ⁽²⁸⁾ This is exactly what makes it harder and more uncomfortable to experience than the other tragedies, but exactly what gives it greater power and relevance to us.

3.4 Worldly Wisdom in King Lear

Let us now consider the depiction of wisdom and folly in what many consider Shakespeare's greatest play. In terms and images very reminiscent of Paul, the characters who behave foolishly according to the world's standards, especially the Fool, Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar, turn out to have real, life-giving, Divine Wisdom; on the other hand, the characters obsessed with being wise by worldly standards, typified by Goneril, participate in a fatal folly, a blinding self-absorption that makes them not only cruel and rapacious, but ultimately miserable and self-destructive. Especially interesting in this analysis is the insight it offers us into Lear himself, for it sees his transformation not as redemption in the fullest (or more optimistic) sense, but as the absolutely necessary and painfully beautiful preparation for redemption, the enlightenment and transformation of a man from normalcy to truth, from appearance to reality, from bondage to freedom, as difficult and fatal (and therefore tragic) as the movement there has been.

If the selfless Fool, Edgar, Kent, and Cordelia lead Lear to real, divine Wisdom, then it is probably not surprising that the chief spokesperson for the falsifying and deadly wisdom of the world is Goneril, a Shakespearean villain devoid of even the minimal humanity of an Iago or Richard III, who often fascinate us, while she can only horrify and repulse. She is a truly apocalyptic character who deserves every one of the horrific, animal labels applied to her in the play (though one may well think these grossly unfair to the animals so compared), one who could easily have spoken the inhuman line of the Flannery O'Connor character the Misfit, that there is in life, "No pleasure but meanness." ⁽²⁹⁾ Without the sincere and eloquent (if cruel) soliloquies of Edmund, and without his sense of shame and self-defensiveness, ⁽³⁰⁾ all her strikes are pre-emptive, the height (or depth) of an earthly wisdom of self-interest, always seeking to stay one step ahead of her opposition, and always assuming that everyone is really or potentially her enemy. Edmund's evil is reactive (and partly understandable, given the first lines of the play, in which he is publicly humiliated in what seems like a routine way by his unthinking, lecherous father); Goneril's is proactive, motiveless, gratuitous, beyond understanding. And unlike Edmund or the Misfit, a further problem with Goneril is how well she fits into polite society, thereby giving free and murderous reign to her evil wisdom: her penultimate line in the play was a hair's breadth away from becoming completely and irrevocably true, "[T]he laws are mine" (V.iii.159). Only the second time we see her, she is already referring to her father as an "Old fool" (I.iii.19), and immediately following this, she tells him to "make use of your good wisdom" (I.iv.210), and "be wise" (I.iv.230), while behind his back ridiculing his "dotage" (I.iv.284). She finds nothing unusual or inappropriate in bolting the doors on her eighty year old father in the midst of a hellish storm: she says it's the fault of "his folly" (II.iv.286), and her sister too calls their gratuitous cruelty "wisdom" (II.iv.302). No characters could better illustrate James' description of earthly wisdom: "This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice" (Jas 3:15-16).

In the characters of Goneril and Regan, Shakespeare has exaggerated and perverted the worldly wisdom of self-preservation and shrewd calculation that we see in the Biblical tradition and elsewhere into hideous creatures that have practiced rapacity and cruelty so thoroughly that they have now become "natural" urges followed for their own sake (cf. Lear's many appeals to "nature," and his anguished cry that she is "unnatural" - II.iv.273), rather than temporary concessions to practicality. It is this exaggeration that in fact makes their self-interested acts self-destructive, for the sisters lack all sense of balance, order, or restraint (never mind goodness or virtue). On Goneril's side, this is expressed especially in pursuing Edmund with her husband still alive, an action not "merely" sinful, but impractical, that leads to all the deaths at the end; and for Regan, it is her insistence that Gloucester's eye-gouging be pursued beyond the normal or acceptable bounds of torture at the time (the servants do not protest the first eye-gouging, only the second), leading directly to Cornwall's death, the hostility of the common people against them, and again indirectly to all their deaths. ⁽³¹⁾

Goneril and Regan's lust is a good focus for understanding their kind of wisdom. What finally is the difference between love and lust? One needn't think theologically or ethically, just in a straightforward description. What is lust but love minus all concerns for other people, a desire to get with no desire to give? Or, a little more cynically, what is love but lust with a lot of concern for the other person added? I do not mean to minimize the importance of this addition, and Shakespeare maximizes it in this play. On the one hand, as described in Corinthians and practiced by Kent, Cordelia, the Fool, and Edgar (and, hopefully but painfully, by all of us at least once in our lives), love is a very daunting and "foolish" exercise, so totally focused on the needs of another person who may not appreciate or benefit from it, while ignoring one's own needs and safety. As Bloom emphasizes in his nihilistic analysis, it ruins or kills all its devotees in the play: "Its value . . . is less than negative: it may be stronger than death, but it leads only to death." ⁽³²⁾ On the other hand, lust (in the seventeenth century or in ours) initially looks much wiser and more practical than love: it seeks something pleasurable that you want (and which is often pretty easy to obtain), it ignores inconvenient consequences, it seeks to maximize gain while minimizing cost (crassly immortalized in the adage that you don't buy the cow if you can get the milk for free), and it may result in you passing on more of your genes to the next generation than your more conservative and repressed neighbors. So what's not to like?

While love is an arduous and often fatal trial, subtracting its other-directed elements and reducing it to lust as Goneril and Regan do only makes it an enslaving addiction or affliction, ⁽³³⁾ and still just as fatal. (Indeed, Edmund's greater power and appeal in the play are because he maintains an icy, almost inhuman control over his urges, apparently feeling none of the lust of the women who pursue him. Even his power grab and his distaste for his father and half-brother seem matter of fact and unemotional: his plans for exterminating them are as cold and methodical as what one would use against bipedal vermin.) The good characters suffer and are killed because they courageously and foolishly overcome the natural urge of self-preservation - they literally lack the sense to come in out of the rain, while Goneril and Regan are destroyed by foolishly succumbing to their appetites, both natural and unnatural. Our possession of natural urges or appetites is neither wise nor foolish, it's simply a fact. But the control or (dis)use of such urges can be wise or foolish: Goneril and Regan have refused the natural urge of filial love until it has atrophied into nonexistence (quite possibly in reaction to Lear's own bad parenting), ⁽³⁴⁾ while they have replaced it by overindulging in the unnatural urge to cruelty and the natural appetite of sexual desire, making these into psychological monstrosities or addictions that destroy them. On the other hand, Edgar and the Fool, the characters antithetical to Goneril and Regan, pose riddles that "insist on the alien aspect of Nature and on all that detracts from man's sense of his own dignity - corns, chilbains, lice, and the mere pricking of sexual desire." ⁽³⁵⁾ The Fool does not deny the presence or necessity of such prickings, but nor does he advocate for them in the bawdy humor typical of Shakespeare's comic characters: ⁽³⁶⁾ he only makes fun of such urges, and of the people who give in to them or who deny their reality. The only advocates for unrestrained appetite are Goneril and Regan (and Lear in his madness as he speculates with bitterest irony about the source of their evil), and they are anything but humorous or wise.

Also extremely revealing of Goneril's "wisdom" is its contrast with Albany's new "folly" in Act IV, what has been called his (belated and ineffectual) "detonation. . . . a timed explosion, a retarded awakening to human evil and a transformation from confused disinterest to engaged commitment." ⁽³⁷⁾ This is the first time someone other than Lear has stood up to Goneril and her "wisdom," and she reacts to her husband exactly as she did to her father, calling him a "fool" and his words "foolish" five times in the heated exchange (IV.ii.28, 37, 54, 58, 61). She had earlier chastised her husband in similar, though much less offensive terms: "You are much more atasked for want of wisdom / Than praised for harmful mildness" (I.iv.334-35). Goneril twists positive, Christian images into ugliness and insult: for her, pity for the weak is not the milk of human kindness, but "cowish" (IV.ii.12) and "milk-livered" (IV.ii.50; cf. the earlier "milky kindness" at I.iv.332), and Christ's admonition to turn the other cheek is spat out of her mouth as an accusation of cowardice and impotence (IV.ii.51). Goneril is unspeakably evil, but her analysis of others is quite accurate: she has rightly understood Albany's "folly" as Christ-like "folly" and her reaction to it is what we would expect from worldly "wisdom" - derision and disgust. But unlike in Act I, something must have changed in Albany's anatomy or psyche, such that he is now capable of giving as good as Goneril does, and he rightly diagnoses her "wisdom" as anything but: "Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; / Filths savor but themselves" (IV.ii.38-39). To follow an earthly "wisdom" that mocks compassion and praises cruelty is to descend into a cannibalistic, self-destructive hell, breaking all the "natural" ties that make life liveable or worth living: "Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep" (IV.ii.49-50).

But if Goneril is the most consistent and horrifying spokesperson for her kind of worldly wisdom, it is more important for the meaning of the play that at the beginning the hero himself is dangerously close to his evil daughters' point of view, as there is a family resemblance in general: "Lear and all three daughters suffer from a plethora of prides." ⁽³⁸⁾ Although nowhere in the play could we say that Lear behaves with his evil daughters' "predatory self-seeking," ⁽³⁹⁾ it is not unfair to observe that the dominant male lion of the pride need not be predatory: his females bring him what he needs without him behaving in a ruthless or violent manner. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Likewise the aged Lear can be calm and generous so long as everyone plays the role which he has imperiously and without consultation assigned to him or her. But the fragility of his calm and the hollowness of his generosity are obvious as soon as Cordelia refuses to speak her assigned lines. And the way Lear rewards mere flattery as soon as Cordelia shows herself unwilling to express her real affection satisfactorily is as ugly as the flattery itself, and much more catastrophic. Lear tries to use his authority and the kingly "patina of symbolic paternalism" ⁽⁴¹⁾ to get what he wants, just as Goneril and Regan use the outer shows of filial or sororal affection and loyalty to get what they want: in the beginning he is as addicted to and manipulative of appearances as they are. To be sure, his appetites are quite different and more humane and elevated than theirs: he has acquired in his un-described past the political power for which they lust, and in which he apparently has little interest, as he divests himself of it with far too little thought. Lear's needs are purely emotional, but just because his desires are much less mundane and much more personal than theirs, his selfish and manipulative pursuit of them is perhaps even more ugly.

While sharing his evil daughters' taste for appearances, showmanship, and the opinions of others, Lear also shares their taste for violent retaliation, another quality that has a patina of justice or common sense upon it. After September 11, I saw it expressed frequently on bumper stickers and gas station marquees in the common, impious truncation of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others." Lear's need for revenge is clear in the first scene, but in its sequel in Act I, Scene iv, it seems even more obscene, as it now lacks the spontaneous, explosive quality of a man losing his temper, as in the first scene, and instead it has become both more petty and more venomous. And for a man who can't take even the mildest of criticism, Lear certainly can dish it out. After bickering for 75 lines, and before he even knows that Goneril has dismissed half his retinue, Lear prays (in front of Goneril!) in the most ungodly way imaginable:

Hear, Nature, hear; dear goddess, hear:

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,

And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honor her. If she must teem,

Create her child of spleen, that it may live

And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. (I.iv.266-74)

I'm no expert, but I would hazard that in general it is not a symptom of a healthy mind for a man to be thinking overmuch about his daughter's "organs of increase" or having strong, violent emotions about them, and he definitely should not to be calling down curses upon them that will blast them with poisonous vapors and fill them with spleen. Exactly like his evil daughters, for the first two acts of the play, Lear selfishly and deceitfully manipulates people to get what he wants, and when he is slighted, he viciously (if ineffectually at that point) retaliates with no consideration for the other person. Though not as diseased as they are, clearly years of playing the role of king, of being what people expect and having people do and say what he expects, have made Lear into a man who has little respect for the truth, who automatically believes in the justice of his own cause, and who tends to react with revenge and savagery, not forgiveness, compassion, or even understanding.

The worldly wisdom that uses and manipulates appearances at the same time as it values the superficial distinctions and gradations of the social hierarchy is repeatedly illustrated by the play's fascination with clothing. In the play clothes are never used for protection from the elements, as Lear rightly diagnoses in his explosion against Goneril and Regan's cruel "reason":

O reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady:

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. (II.iv.259-65)

Lear and his daughters know perfectly well what they are doing. All their "reasons" for stripping him of his retinue are legitimate, but deliberately ignore the deeper reality, that clothes really do make the man: "In 2.4 the sisters are scrupulously, icily polite, even solicitous, as they ignore what is staring them in the face, that they are stripping Lear of his self." ⁽⁴²⁾ The ladies wear clothes that not only show their social status as princesses, they create that status. Throughout the play, language (whether in verbal, symbolic, meteorological, or fashion statements) is part of reality, not merely a reflection of reality (and on this crucial point, both Cordelia and Lear are profoundly wrong in their disagreement over the [in]ability to speak about love). Goneril and Regan seek to take away any remaining trappings of kingship from Lear not for reasons of mere practicality, but because they want to rob him of all status and make it clear to him and everyone else that he is under their control, not vice versa. As Lear notes, they want to reduce him to a merely animal or biological existence: like a pathetic stray animal they have found, they will feed and shelter him, but nothing more. They will show him none of the respect due to a king or father, and they will allow him to show none of the authority of those roles either: they will not even leave him the minimal dignity of a man.

But Lear still values clothes and what they represent at this point, and it is part of his horribly painful education that he must learn not to value them. He learns that clothes are not only part of what makes us human, as opposed to animal, they are also mechanical, contrived, and artificial, and thereby threaten our humanity in a different way. There is something intrinsically disingenuous, stilted, and stifling about clothes: they not only create our social roles, they also trap us in them and falsify our nature, for they are part of "the whole structure of values and practices that govern, protect, and disguise men in society." ⁽⁴³⁾ And as wrong and sadistic as Goneril and Regan are for "stripping" their father, there is something profoundly inhuman or subhuman about someone who overvalues clothes and the social hierarchy they represent. This is brought out in the play by the character most removed in status and personality from Lear, the craven toady Oswald. The honest Kent twice says that this vile creature was made by a tailor (II.ii.50, 53), an insult that I had previously just passed over (Kent has a long and colorful litany of them directed at Oswald, "base football player" [I.iv.82] being perhaps the most memorable), until Phyllis Rackin offered the insight that this places Oswald irrevocably into the inhuman realm that overvalues clothes and social hierarchy: "Since he is nothing but clothes, he is inhuman . . . . If the poor, bare, forked animal needs clothes to distinguish him from the beasts, the thing made by a tailor lacks even the natural affections that distinguish the beasts from inanimate things." ⁽⁴⁴⁾ Oswald cannot "distinguish value from rank," ⁽⁴⁵⁾ and for the first two acts of the play, Lear cannot either, just as he cannot distinguish any inner value from its outward appearance. It is only when Lear painfully overcomes the distinctions on which his life (and to a large extent ours) has been based that he can begin to see and enter a higher reality: "When the divisions are erased and the individual has been exposed as the 'poor thing' Lear discovers him to be - that is the portal of the Kingdom of God." ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Lear literally and symbolically shows his rejection of the deadly, falsifying nature of clothes and rank when he begins to disrobe in Act III (III.iv.103), and again in his scene of madness in Act IV (IV.vi.170, see below). In this scene he insists upon his kingship (IV.vi.196), that he is even "every inch a king" (IV.vi.106). Apparently Lear has achieved a new kind of dignity and worth not founded on appearances and convention, and he reiterates the disrobing gesture and its meaning with his dying breath (V.iii.310). As painful and fatal as this movement has been, it has improved Lear and elevated him above the false life and values he shared with his evil daughters and Oswald at the beginning of the play.

Even more painful - because it is both a more elevated and a more basic human urge - is the lesson that Lear has to learn about justice in this world. (That justice is more basic than clothing should be clear to anyone with small children, who are constantly averse to clothing, and certainly have no inkling about its symbolism, but whose favorite and nearly first articulate exclamation is "That's not fair!") When he has cast himself out into the storm to flee the worse buffetings of his daughters' cruelties, Lear cries out against the injustices done to him, and expresses his pious hope (whether pagan or Christian makes no difference on this point, as both share this piety) that the gods will speedily reassert their justice:

Let the great gods

That keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads

Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,

That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes

Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,

Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue

That are incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,

That under covert and convenient seeming

Has practiced on man's life. Close pent-up guilts,

Rive your concealing continents and cry

These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man

More sinned against than sinning. (III.ii.49-60)

The power of the storm scenes lies in the outrage we feel along with Lear against what is happening to him, and the exhilaration we feel at his Job-like defiance: his "passionate protest against injustice and humiliation affirms human dignity despite the most relentless pressure of cruelty, cynicism, and degradation." ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Just as his ordinariness renders him more accessible to us, so does his all too human protest: "Lear appeals primordially to the universal outrage of all those acutely conscious of their own mortality." ⁽⁴⁸⁾

But as much as we sympathize with Lear and thrill at his defiance, he - and much more importantly we - must learn two very painful truths. This is true dramatically as well as morally, as recognition is a crucial element in Aristotle's analysis of tragedy: "Recognition . . . denotes the character's shift of perception, perspective, and attitude that develops as the plot unfolds. . . . recognition implies that the character discovers a deeper truth that somehow was already known but ignored." ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Without lapsing into shrill, nagging "Bildadism" ⁽⁵⁰⁾ and foolishly thinking that his suffering is somehow commensurate with what he has done, it is nonetheless crucial for Lear's enlightenment that he recognize that he is responsible for this situation. Secondly, he must accept that there will be no divine retribution meted out against those who have wronged him. It is clear from the beginning and end of Lear's speech quoted above that the erroneous but comforting beliefs in divine justice and in his own (relative) innocence go hand in hand in his mind, and most often in ours: "Let the great gods / . . . Find out their enemies now. . . . / I am a man / More sinned against than sinning" (III.ii.49, 51, 59-60). (Gloucester expresses the same futile and blinding wish for justice at IV.i.64-71.) As long as Lear tries to defend himself and wait for the gods to vindicate him, he will be crushed by his daughters' cruelty, while remaining blind to his own sins.

The first of these lessons comes to Lear relatively easily, even if he postpones the full ramifications of his guilt for much longer: as early Act I, Scene iv, he can admit his error, "O Lear, Lear, Lear! / Beat at this gate that let thy folly in"(I.iv.261-62), and a little later, even his guilt, "I did her wrong" (I.v.21). The second lesson - that there is in this life no justice, whether human or divine, that the gods or God will not lift one divine finger to end or even mitigate human suffering - understandably takes Lear much longer to accept, for it is a vision too horrible to contemplate, too shattering of everything he holds as valuable and meaningful. ⁽⁵¹⁾ But as long as he holds on to this comforting but false vision of divine justice, it will crush and blind him, for it is a "fiendish burden of justice. . . . a delusional vision." ⁽⁵²⁾ The mad Lear (who now knows much more than ever before) finally and fully comes to this realization in Act IV while speaking to the blind Gloucester (who sees things clearly for the first time):

LEAR Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

GLOUCESTER Ay, sir.

LEAR And the creature run from the cur. There thou

mightst behold the great image of authority - a dog's

obeyed in office.

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.

Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind

For which thou whip'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it.

None does offend, none - I say none! I'll able 'em.

Take that of me, my friend, who have the power

To seal th' accusers lips. Get thee glass eyes

And, like a scurvy politician, seem

To see the things thou dost not. Now, now, now, now!

Pull of my boots. Harder, harder! So. (IV.vi.152-70)

It is a shocking and horrible conclusion for a king to have to come to: a life of authoritative commands is equated to the barking of a dog, and a life of dispensing "justice" is recognized as nothing but hypocrisy, injustice, and violence. But Edgar rightly evaluates the truth of Lear's speech in the next line: "Reason in madness" (IV.vi.172). Lear's realization is as necessary and redemptive as it is shattering, for it is only when Lear can let go of his false political and theological worlds, that a new world and outlook can dawn on him, "the remarkably Christian conclusion that in this world there is no continuing city and that we are 'strangers and sojourners' (see Lev. 25:23) without expectation of the cessation of intrigue or warfare in the here and now." ⁽⁵³⁾ As depressing as it is for Lear or us to renounce the possibility of justice in this life and accept God's silence at our suffering, it lets him see a higher realm, as "he awakens to an ultimate reality . . . which foretells his final unutterable epiphany." ⁽⁵⁴⁾ It is exactly like Job, who finally understands the utter poverty of his former life and values, and accepts God in all His frightening mystery: "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:5-6).

In the end, Lear is rescued from himself, cured of his madness and his addiction to the worldly wisdom that has defined and ruined his life. Although Bloom asserts that there is no positive side to Lear's story, he clearly agrees with this assessment of the negative, of what Lear has learned to reject and despise: "Lear's prophecy fuses reason, nature, and society into one great negative image, the inauthentic authority of this great stage of fools." ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Bloom can reasonably reject any positive meaning, because the price of Lear's realization is so staggering, even by the standards of tragedy, and its outcome offers no clear compensation. Unlike the Book of Job to which it bears so much resemblance, the ending of King Lear gives no recompense to the destroyed hero for all his suffering, but only the respite of death: ". . . the parallels with the Book of Job serve to mark the ending of King Lear not as an adaptation but a bitter Beckett-like parody." ⁽⁵⁶⁾ Anyone who can read the last 70 lines of the play or see them acted on stage with dry eyes must be a "stone," as Lear himself accuses (V.iii.258). As we look at the horror on stage, even though we might long for a different ending, we know not only that a different ending cannot be, but that it positively should not be: "The theatrical point of the play's ending, then, seems to be that the theatre's capacity to show us what we want is firmly denied. We are not going to get what we want; we are going to have to watch the tragedy that has been building in the play from the start." ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Any alternative ending we could come up with would be a "remedy [that] would give more discomfort than the disease," ⁽⁵⁸⁾ a cruel kindness, as Kent also describes similar attempts to "help" Lear: "He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out any longer" (V.iii.314-16). This is not (only) because Shakespeare is smarter or wiser than we are, but because in life, as in the play, suffering is not only inevitable, it can also have infinite value, with the corollary that enlightenment is not only eminently avoidable, it is also very painful: "The spiritual meaning of suffering has nowhere been more fully communicated than in King Lear." ⁽⁵⁹⁾ The transformation from spiritual death to life gains us immortality at the expense of the mortal, as Paul also said, "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power" (1 Cor 15:36, 42-43). Lear and Cordelia would have died eventually, but without this ending, they may not have known how much they loved each other, they may not have faced how much they had hurt one another, and that would have been a much worse tragedy.

Having considered the negative side of Lear's education or redemption - what it is that he must unlearn, what it is that he must be redeemed from - let us now consider the positive side - what he learns, or the state into whiich he is redeemed. If Goneril's worldly wisdom shows Lear the painful meaninglessness and worthlessness of his former life, it is the foolish love and trust of Cordelia, Kent, the Fool, and Edgar that show him what has real worth. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

3.5 "And my poor fool is hanged": The Foolish Wisdom of King Lear

That something wonderful and awful happens to Lear in his final moments is acknowledged by all, but what that is has been interpreted in quite different ways, and ways that, like the alternative happy endings proposed by some, trivialize or overlook a deeper reality that Lear has reached. Some think Lear is imagining that Cordelia is still alive, and therefore he dies in joy, receiving some recompense or escape from all the horror: ⁽⁶¹⁾ a happy ending, but a pathetic one, I think, if our hero can only die in a happy delusion that has replaced the vicious delusion that his former life has been. Redemption is a change of state (originally, from slavery to freedom): for Lear to go from a deluded, unhappy state to a deluded, happy state is clearly a kind of change, but not the right one, leaving his life and death still in untruth. On the other hand, some have suggested that Lear at the end sees the truth that Cordelia is alive in heaven. ⁽⁶²⁾ This to me is too naively optimistic, and, more importantly, disconnects the last scene from the rest of the play, for what does Lear's suffering (the constant, overwhelming theme of the play) have to do with Cordelia being in heaven? A deceased loved one being in heaven is a pleasant enough thought that anyone could arrive at without the personal and national cataclysm we have seen unfold. If one is to feel uplifted by the ending of the play (and I admit I do), if Lear's suffering is to have meaning for himself and us, it would have to be because his spurning of the deadly, worldly wisdom described above has also led him to embrace something new and vivifying: "Those who have felt the play to be about redemption have had trustworthy feelings, but those who have tried to make it doctrinally Christian, or who have seen Cordelia as a Christ figure, have missed the play's powerful expression of spiritual transformation." ⁽⁶³⁾ Lear has been transformed because he has been led to the terrible and fatal, but true and liberating realization that his life has been a lie, at the same time as Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, and the Fool have shown him the goodness and truth that have always been right in front of him. Cordelia is not a Christ figure, for her death is not redemptive, but her life and the lives of these other Christ-like characters are redemptive, for they lead Lear to truth, compassion, and love.

The Fool and Cordelia embody truth more than do Edgar and Kent, who are in disguise and therefore participate in (well-intentioned) deception. The Fool and Cordelia always speak the truth to Lear, regardless of the consequences or whether he wants to hear it. As foolish as this is by earthly, self-seeking wisdom, it is wise by the standards of heavenly Wisdom: "But the wisdom from above is first pure . . . open to reason . . . without uncertainty or insincerity" (Jas 3:17). Truth is also a fundamental part of love, which "rejoices in the truth" (1 Cor 13:6 [NRSV]), and there is no questioning the depth and sincerity of the love that the Fool and Cordelia have for Lear. Their single role as loving truth-tellers to Lear is so identical that it finally causes Lear to confuse them in his last speech, "And my poor fool is hanged" (V.iii.306), a conflation that has been called a "divine confusion": ⁽⁶⁴⁾ we may call it at least a wise and loving one. As we have seen, truth is also something that has been sorely and devastatingly lacking in Lear's life. It is an essential part of the truth that it is usually uncomfortable and unacceptable to us, as Cordelia's speech is unacceptable to her foolish father in the first scene, and as the Fool's speeches are to the worldly-wise Goneril. This fits in with the Biblical depiction of prophets as fools or madmen, including Paul's description of himself (2 Cor 11:23), "prophecy having historic associations with madness and being the medium in which, historically, the paradoxes of reason and madness, folly and wisdom are unfolded. . . . the Fool's prophecy is essential to King Lear - a quintessential manifestation of its cosmos." ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Through their foolish devotion and self-sacrifice to the truth, Cordelia and the Fool teach Lear its infinite value at the same time as he is learning of the deadly worthlessness of lies and appearances.

But there are deep limitations even in this foolish but noble devotion to the truth. As wise as these characters are compared to the evil Goneril or to the self-deluded Lear, no one possesses the whole truth. Their perspective is therefore "slant and incomplete. . . . merely part of the truth." ⁽⁶⁶⁾ The role of incomplete, humanly-held truth is therefore mostly negative. It can and should correct people who erroneously believe that they possess the whole truth, the primary role of the Fool towards his master Lear: "After all, the Fool's function is to tell subversive truths to a court society foolish enough to think its own truths are the truth." ⁽⁶⁷⁾ And even partial truth can expose those who tell lies as if they were the truth, the role of the Fool and Cordelia towards her evil sisters: "He [the Fool] can formulate the tenets of worldly wisdom with a clarity that worldly wisdom often prefers to blur. He defines the predatory self-seeking of Goneril and Regan." ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Partial truth can point out the inadequacy of other partial truths and the evil of falsehood, but it cannot offer a completely satisfying alternative, since it is itself only a partial truth.

A further complication or imperfection in one's devotion to truth is in its motives, which are quite susceptible of slipping into selfishness and self-righteousness. (Indeed, one could hazard that no virtuous inclination is more susceptible to this corruption than the supposed devotion to truth: who among us has not hurt someone else, and then justified it by saying that we were just being honest, or that it was for their own good, when really it was because we like being right and putting others in their place?) Such a selfishness hidden in her supposed selflessness has often been detected in Cordelia's actions in the first scene, succinctly and famously summed up as her "faulty admixture of pride and sullenness." ⁽⁶⁹⁾ She has plenty of her father's stubbornness, "the old man's willfulness," ⁽⁷⁰⁾ and at least a little of her sisters' devotion to legitimacy and rationality at the expense of emotion: "Cordelia is justified in all that she says, but not loveable." ⁽⁷¹⁾ Cordelia seems to value truth over love: "Cordelia is more concerned with the spiritual pride of her integrity, at the beginning, and the righteousness of her position vis à vis her sisters, at the end, than with love. Her self-image interferes with her ability to love." ⁽⁷²⁾

Furthermore, her ideas about love are not at all true (at least as expressed in the awkward, disastrous first scene): "Her ideas are only a variation on Lear's; she too thinks of affection as a quantitative, portionable medium of exchange of goods and services (1.1.95-104)." ⁽⁷³⁾ Cordelia loves the truth, but she does not know the truth about love: it is not something she can teach her father, but something they must learn together. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ The Fool, on the other hand, becomes irrelevant to Lear because he is capable of teaching Lear the truth: "When Lear has absorbed the Fool's truths and begins to utter them himself, the Fool becomes redundant." ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Either way, it is clear that while truth is a necessary (and often painful) part of love, love abides longer and dwells deeper within us than the truth, it is eventually "what Lear now needs more than the truth." ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Built on a foundation of truth, love takes us much higher than truth alone could: "Love never ends" (1 Cor 13:8).

The other two good characters who help Lear overcome his evil daughters and himself are Kent and Edgar, and they embody compassion much more than do Cordelia and the Fool. After the first scene, they do not practice the kind of "tough love" that Cordelia and the Fool force upon Lear: rather, they practice the literal meaning of compassion (or sympathy) by "suffering with" Lear throughout his ordeal. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Like the truth, compassionate suffering is a part of both New Testament love and Wisdom: "Love bears all things . . . endures all things" (1 Cor 13:7); "But the wisdom from above is . . . full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty" (Jas 3:17). The goodness and purity of their motives and feelings are even less in question than Cordelia's, as she herself acknowledges, "O thou good Kent, how shall I live and work / To match thy goodness?" (IV.vii.1-2). They are much more present to Lear and his suffering than the physically absent Cordelia or the mentally distant Fool. Cordelia in the first scene and the Fool throughout mock Lear's pain (in a therapeutic but still painful way), while Kent and Edgar suffer it with him, experiencing pity and empathy for him that are almost unbearable. Edgar bears the pains of his blinded father as Stoically as he can, but his emotions overcome him, "[aside] I cannot daub it further. / . . . Bless thy sweet eyes, they bleed" (IV.i.52, 54), as they did earlier when he met the wronged Lear, "My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting" (III.vi.59-60). Edgar later gives a rather pious and unemotional diagnosis of his father's eye gouging, "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us. / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes" (V.iii.171-74), ⁽⁷⁸⁾ but cannot help exclaiming when he sees the ruined king, "O thou side-piercing sight!" (IV.vi.85). ⁽⁷⁹⁾ And Kent expresses the ultimate empathy and sacrifice for his king in his final lines: "Break, heart, I prithee break! ⁽⁸⁰⁾ . . . / I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. / My master calls me; I must not say no" (V.iii.313, 322-23). Goneril and Regan adhere to inhuman reason and hypertrophied lust, Edmund lacks all emotions, and even Cordelia is a bit too self-composed and self-assured, but Kent and Edgar are pure, unerring, and healing passion and feeling, Lear's "physician[s]" as Kent labels himself (I.i.163). ⁽⁸¹⁾

But exactly as the devotion to truth of Cordelia and the Fool has its shortcomings, so too does human compassion, as noble and beautiful as it is. Kent throughout seems more concerned with Lear's physical safety - that he be clothed, sheltered, kept dry and warm - than with his spiritual well being. This concern with the merely physical even seems to overtake the Fool, replacing his concerns for Lear's more substantive improvement. ⁽⁸²⁾ Edgar too seems mostly concerned with keeping his father alive (understandable given the results when he reveals himself). This is a common shortcoming of compassion: how many of us are eager to alleviate the more obvious physical ailments of other people, especially our children, while we deny or overlook deeper and potentially more harmful emotional needs because we just don't know how to deal with them? Feeding, clothing, or sheltering someone can be costly, but it is totally straightforward compared to the nebulous and open-ended goal of making someone happy. Ultimately, no one can do that for another person, they can only lead and love by example, and at this Kent and Edgar are powerful and purposeful: "It is part of the play's developing purpose to transform us . . . from devils of rational intellect, into Gods of known and feeling sorrow." ⁽⁸³⁾ If Cordelia and the Fool show Lear how to live (and die) for the truth, Kent and Edgar show him what it is to live (and die) for another person. They pity Lear so that he can learn to stop pitying himself and begin to pity others, they suffer with him so that he can learn how to overlook his suffering and begin to suffer with others, and they alleviate his suffering so that he can learn how to help and love others: "Love is patient and kind" (1 Cor 13:4).

While Shakespeare has used Edgar, Kent, Cordelia, and the Fool to emphasize and point to some of the shortcomings of parts of love, it is clear that together they embody unconditional love in the most pure and noble way imaginable. Lear has given each of them every reason not to love but despise him, and they have steadfastly refused, though the world dissolve around them. The line spoken of Cordelia, "Thou hast one daughter / Who redeems Nature from the general curse" (IV.vi.201-02), could just as easily apply to all of them. Cordelia and Edgar together, through truth and compassion, redeem the nature of children from deceit and cruelty, just as the Fool and Kent do so for the nature of servants. And their unconditional love finally leads Lear to love unconditionally as father and king, and redeem his own nature, as we will see.

How much has Lear learned to appreciate and live according to this kind of foolish wisdom before he dies? There are glimpses of it in Act III when Lear shows concern and compassion for the Fool (III.iv.23-27) and for the disguised Edgar (III.iv.61-73). Later, in his reunions with Cordelia and finally with Kent, Lear shows how much he has learned from them. While the whole tragedy of the play was set in motion by Lear's foolish, childish, tyrannical demand that others speak and tell of their love for him (I.i.54, 86, 90), he enters the stage for the last time saying that he will now speak (V.iii.258-60), speak of his dead daughter and his love for her. While part of Lear's madness is brought on by his repeated, inhuman refusal to weep (I.iv.287-88; II.iv.278-81), he can learn from Cordelia (IV.vii.71; V.iii.23) how to bring himself even to this show of weakness (III.vii.62; V.iii.283). Whereas he had cursed and punished Cordelia in the first scene, he puts himself completely at her disposal in the end, ready to accept punishment from her, "If you have poison for me, I will drink it" (IV.vii.72), and eager to beg for her forgiveness, "Pray you now, forget and forgive" (IV.vii.85). He tearfully thanks Kent when his servant reveals the faithful service he has given "his enemy king" (V.iii.221). And while Gloucester couldn't stand being in the presence of the loved one he had wronged (dying as soon as Edgar reveals himself), Lear only wants to be with his beloved, serving and loving her, as they both serve "God" (the only singular use of "God" in the play):

Come, let's away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too -

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out -

And take upon 's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,

In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by th' moon. (V.iii.8-19)

Lear has learned that he is "a very foolish fond old man" (IV.vii.60), but this is a totally different "folly" than Kent diagnosed in the first scene (I.i.149): it is the folly that knows enough to admit its weakness and its dependence on other people and on God, rather than rashly and foolishly asserting its independence or dominance over them. Lear has now achieved the folly that sees and values things as they really are, the folly that makes weakness into a value: "When we come crying hither, we bring with us the badge of all our misery; but it is also the badge of the vulnerabilities that give us access to whatever grandeur we achieve." ⁽⁸⁴⁾ This, of course, is no longer folly at all, but real sight and knowledge, the highest wisdom one can achieve - a loving humility, a humble love.

All of this is radically, steadfastly opposed to Goneril's worldly, self-seeking "wisdom," and to Lear's own tyrannically egoistical behavior in the first scene: "In a world of lust, cruelty and greed, with extremes of wealth and poverty, man reduced to his essentials needs not wealth, nor power, nor even physical freedom, but rather patience, stoical fortitude, and love; needs, perhaps, above all, mutual forgiveness, the exchange of charity." ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Lear has learned that "Love does not insist on its own way" (1 Cor 13:5): in his final scenes he is completely focused on others and the loving service and gratitude he can offer them. Nothing could be more childish than his behavior in the first scene, and by the end he has finally given up his "childish ways" (1 Cor 13:11), and he spends what is left of his life practicing a mature, giving, caring, properly parental love. No longer a child, he can enter his final scene carrying his dead child in his arms, an image meant to evoke a pietà, ⁽⁸⁶⁾ the image of Mary holding the dead body of her son Jesus: there are few images of a love that is higher, more patient, or more perfect than that of Mary. This development in Lear is as heroic and miraculous as any imaginable, a monumental and truly life-giving transformation, even (or especially) if he happens to stop breathing shortly thereafter: ⁽⁸⁷⁾ "Lear dies . . . with his whole being launched toward another. . . . the image is deeply tragic; yet it is also, in the play's terms, a kind of victory." ⁽⁸⁸⁾ Indeed, to learn to love truly is about the only thing that could possibly be worth all the pain he has endured.

3.6 Conclusion: Folly as a Higher Wisdom

Consider the "fool's speech" I gave above in praise of lust (and one could easily transform the speech to relate it to any self-centered, acquisitive behavior), about how it garnered so many tangible, immediate rewards with minimal effort or risk. Now suppose that one could simply discount what happens to Goneril and Regan as fanciful poetic justice with little relevance to our own lives: one can easily imagine a lust-filled life without all that bloodshed and violence (as one can imagine Scrooge living a normal life and dying a peaceful death without all those pesky ghosts, relatives, and employees redirecting or diluting his greed). If you're afraid of disease, you can trust modern science and practice "protected sex" (as if there were ever a time in your life when you are [and probably should be] more vulnerable and exposed than during sex). If divine rather than biological punishment has got you down, go ahead and discount the seemingly unlikely possibility of retribution in an afterlife. Even so, could any mature person look at such a pragmatic (but undeniably accurate) description of selfishness and say, "Yes, that is exactly what I would like to have, thank you for laying it out in such clear and unambiguous terms. I would most definitely like to devote all my life and energy to pursuing just that goal. I think I'll get started right away." Call me hopelessly optimistic (and believe me, it's not something I'm used to being called), but I would find that very hard to believe. The rewards, while tangible and immediate, are so utterly paltry that no real man or woman would knowingly choose them, or if they did, no one of even average depth and sophistication could remain satisfied with them for an entire lifetime. Such a vision is barely half a step ahead (more like it to the side) of an ideal life that would consist of masturbating all day while drinking ice-cold grape Nehi, watching pornography on a large screen HDTV, and playing Grand Theft Auto III: this would (just barely) seem an appropriate vision of paradise for a thirteen year old boy, but certainly not for anyone with a higher or more sophisticated sense of his or her worth and purpose in life.

Or consider it in terms of what human beings "naturally" (if you'll allow the uncritical use of the term) praise and value. Every culture that has ever prospered has built statues and monuments, and written songs, poems, and plays to honor people who dedicated or sacrificed their lives out of love for their country, or for God, art, or knowledge: who would raise one stone or one syllable to someone who dedicated his or her whole life to greed or lust, even if they didn't overtly hurt people along the way? Henry Ford has improved my life much more directly and noticeably than any artist or composer, but I certainly don't admire him, and I'd rather poke myself in the eye than sing a hymn to him. I might envy Bill Gates for his money, or Hugh Hefner for his twenty-year-old girlfriends, but I don't envy either of those men their lives: I simply like to fantasize about how nice it would be if some of their loot suddenly and effortlessly migrated over on to my materially meager life. But it would never occur to me to call them "wise," not necessarily even "happy," nor would I expend one minute trying to be like them or to get some of what they've got. And if one thinks that's only because I am a "fool" (I admit that I may well be, but not for that reason), just consider the other extreme. No one is so far gone in greed and selfishness that they would not call Mother Theresa, Jesus, or Buddha both very "wise" and very "happy" - all people who died penniless and celibate, but who valued other things that really matter.

And finally, for a minute let's forget about great villains or heroes, whether dramatic or religious - just consider the events of your own life. When you consider all the things you've done to get money or sex or fulfill some other selfish desire, are you really proud of all those actions? Are those the moments for which you would like to be remembered? (Think of Scrooge's pathetic attempt to placate Marley's ghost by observing that he was "always a good man of business," followed by the vulture-like behavior of the people around Scrooge's deathbed: now imagine your own eulogy and the reading of your will occurring in a similar fashion. When you're done cringing, continue the thought experiment.) Aren't there more than a few moments of selfishness that you would like to take back, or at least that you hope no one else finds out about? Most of us are content if we haven't done anything too shameful in pursuit of our selfish goals. Now consider the things you've done for someone or something you love, the things you've done with no thought of how it would benefit you, but only out of devotion to another person or to an idea. Whatever those actions are in your individual case - whether they relate to family, friends, God, knowledge, art, or even sports - and even (or especially) if some of those actions may strike you later as embarrassing or ludicrous, I'm willing to wager that in your most honest and private moments you wouldn't give up any one of them for any other "gain," because there is no other "gain" with which they are comparable or commensurate. They are of a wholly other order - "transcendent" in theological language, because you transcend yourself and your limitations through them (even if they are flawed), rather than remaining trapped and limited in your individuality. I'm the same pathetic person even if I win the lottery, for nothing essential has changed about me, but I become a little less pathetic when I love someone or something outside of myself and begin to live a new life for them and not only for myself. From a worldly perspective, nothing could be more foolish than giving without thought of recompense, but nothing could recompense one more fully and unexpectedly, for it gains one a new wisdom that values the things that are true, beautiful, and eternal.

Notes

1. On Marcion, see Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 4-5.

2. The slight difference between the Old Testament books included in Protestant and Catholic Bibles is another issue: see above, Chapter 1.

3. Boadt, Reading the Old Testament, 20 (emphasis in original).

4. Matt 11:19; 13:54; Mark 6:2; Luke 2:40, 52; 7:35; Col 2:3; Rev 5:12.

5. Luke 11:49; Rom 11:33; 16:27; Eph 3:10; Rev 7:12.

6. Matt 7:24; 10:16; 12:42; 23:34; 24:45; 25:2, 4, 8, 9; Luke 1:17; 11:31; 12:42; 16:8; 21:15; Acts 6:3, 10; 7:10, 22; Rom 16:19; 1 Cor 3:10; 6:5; 12:8; Eph 1:8, 17; 5:15; Col 1:9, 28; 3:16; 4:5; 2 Tim 3:15; Jas 1:5; 3:13, 17; 2 Pet 3:15; Rev 13:18; 17:9.

7. Rom 1:14 (ambiguous), 22; 11:25; 12:16; Col 2:23; 2 Pet 1:16.

8. On Q, see J. S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000).

9. Matt 11:19 // Luke 7:35; Matt 12:42 // Luke 11:31; also in the temptation scene: see K. Paffenroth, "The Testing of the Sage: 1 Kings 10:1-13 and Q 4:1-13." The Expository Times 107 (1996) 142-43.

10. On the situation in Corinth, see the introduction in F. F. Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians (New Century Bible Commentary; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans / London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1971) 18-25.

11. See e.g. T. McFarland, "The Image of the Family in King Lear," in On King Lear (L. Danson, ed.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 91-118, esp. 98; S. Booth, "On the Greatness of King Lear," in William Shakespeare's King Lear (ed. H. Bloom; New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 57-70, esp. 67-68.

12. The lines are assigned to Albany in the Quarto: see the discussion by M. J. Warren, "Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar," in William Shakespeare's King Lear (ed. H. Bloom; New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 45-56.

13. H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 484.

14. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 486.

15. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 521.

16. J. Wittreich, "'Image of that Horror': The Apocalypse in King Lear," in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (eds. C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) 175-206: 179.

17. W. R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1968) 71.

18. J. L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and King Lear (Athens, Ohio, and London: Ohio University Press, 1984) 213.

19. L. Basney, "Is a Christian Perspective on Shakespeare Productive and/or Necessary?" in Shakespeare and the Christian Tradition (ed. E. B. Batson; Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994) 19-35: 35.

20. S. Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 62.

21. On the ending of the Gospel of Mark, see R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2002) 685-88.

22. M. Schwehn, "King Lear beyond Reason," First Things 36 (1993) 25-33: 32. Cf. C. L. Barber, "On Christianity and the Family: Tragedy of the Sacred," in Twentieth Century

Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 117-19, esp. 119: "In their dramatized lives they are in time, and in the human condition where Lear's demand and Cordelia's sacrifice to it lead to total, tragic loss. . . . But the realization of them in the theatre takes them out of time, so that there is a kind of epiphany as we finally see them, a showing forth not of the divine but of the human, sublime and terrible as it reaches towards the divine and towards destruction."

23. Wittreich, "'Image of that Horror,'" 188.

24. R. Nevo, "On Lear and Job," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A

Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 120-22: 120-21.

25. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 479.

26. Cf. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 493: "Lear, beyond us in grandeur and in essential authority, is still a startlingly intimate figure, since he is an emblem of fatherhood itself."

27. This point is made well by McFarland, "Image of the Family," 95, through comparison with Hamlet: "The situation in Hamlet, by contrast, is almost flamboyant; it has the specialness of things that happen only once, in the realm of the hypothetical, and to others than ourselves. . . . A shipwreck happens to others, not to us; and Oedipus, Orestes, and Hamlet find themselves in unthinkable situations that accentuate our own security as spectators. . . . The situation in King Lear involves a different model of experience, an image of family life that is neither flamboyant nor unique. On the contrary, it is in significant respects almost commonplace."

28. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 476.

29. O'Connor, Complete Stories, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," 132.

30. Cf. S. L. Goldberg, "On Edgar's Character," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 114-16: "Edgar. . . . is a true member of the Gloucester family, all of whom in one way or another seem insecure and anxious about themselves, and whose characteristic psychic style is defensive beside the bolder, more challenging, self-confidently active style characteristic of the Lear family" (p. 115).

31. Cf. J. C. Rice, "The Empathic Edgar: Creativity as Redemption in King Lear," Studia Mystica 7 (1984) 50-60: "The belief in rational structures of experience also accounts for the absurd brutality of the villains' acts. It is as unrealistic to expect to insure the future through violent brutality as through praying to a virtue rewarding God" (p. 53).

32. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 486.

33. Cf. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 484: "The gods in King Lear do not kill men and women for their sport; instead they afflict Lear and Edgar with an excess of love, and Goneril and Regan with the torments of lust and jealousy."

34. On Lear's similarity to Goneril and Regan and his complicity in their evil, cf. McFarland, "Image of the Family," 104: "Thus Lear's action, not in becoming angry with Cordelia, who has herself acted with some of the old man's willfulness, but in disclaiming paternal care, propinquity, and property of blood, is, if we like the rhetoric of good and evil, the beginning of the evil in the play's progression of events; it is an action of the same order as those of Goneril and Regan"; and Bloom, Invention of the Human, 509: "The foregrounding of this play would involve a long career of outbursts, which presumably helped convert Regan and Goneril into mincing hypocrites."

35. L. C. Knights, "On the Fool," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 122-23: 123.

36. Cf. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 317: "In contrast to his traditionally ithyphallic comic role and to the concerns for the flesh shared by Touchstone, Feste, Pompey, and Lavache, Lear's 'all-licens'd' Fool seems paradoxically repressive and antiprogenitive. 'Down, wantons, down!' is his theme."

37. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 298, 300.

38. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 508.

39. Knights, "On the Fool," 122.

40. Cf. the animal imagery used by Alfred Harbage in his introduction to the Pelican edition of King Lear (New York: Penguin, 1970) 19: "Cornwall is less repellent than Goneril and Regan only as the mad bull is less repellent than the hyena, they less repellent than Oswald only as the hyena is less repellent than the jackal."

41. McFarland, "Image of the Family," 100.

42. Basney, "Christian Perspective on Shakespeare," 32.

43. P. Rackin, "On Edgar: Delusion as Resolution," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 123-25: 124, emphasis added.

44. Rackin, "On Edgar," 124-25.

45. Rackin, "On Edgar," 125.

46. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 59.

47. Nevo, "Lear and Job," 122.

48. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 510.

49. Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 64.

50. Nevo, "Lear and Job," 121.

51. Cf. Schwehn, "King Lear beyond Reason," 31-32, "And we find what we would expect to find given our analysis of Lear and Edgar, namely, that both of them insist against all appearances that the gods are finally just. . . . Nowhere in any of these men's theologies is there a place for a deity who 'maketh his rain to fall upon the evil and upon the good.'"

52. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 53.

53. C. Davidson, "History of King Lear and the Problem of Belief," Christianity and Literature 45 (1996) 285-301: 296.

54. Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 65.

55. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 515.

56. Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 77.

57. Basney, "Christian Perspective on Shakespeare," 34.

58. Booth, "On the Greatness of King Lear" (1987) 69.

59. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 58.

60. Knights, "On the Fool," 123: "It is through him [the Fool], therefore, that we come to see more clearly the sharp distinction between those whose wisdom is purely for themselves and those foolish ones - Kent, Gloucester, Cordelia, and the Fool himself - who recklessly take their stands on loyalties and sympathies that are quite outside the scope of any prudential calculus."

61. Thus Bloom, Invention of the Human, 486: "The joy that kills Lear is delusional: he apparently hallucinates, and beholds Cordelia either as not having died or as being resurrected."

62. The position of some cited by Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 77.

63. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 58-59.

64. H. C. Goddard, "King Lear," in William Shakespeare's King Lear (ed. H. Bloom; New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 9-43: 34. Cf. the discussions of the identification of the Fool and Cordelia by Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 324; S. Booth, "On the Greatness of King Lear," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 98-111, esp. 103-04; and J. L. Calderwood, "Creative Uncreation in King Lear," in William Shakespeare's King Lear (ed. H. Bloom; New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987) 121-37, esp. 126-27, who makes the common observation that the same actor may have played both parts.

65. J. Wittreich, "Image of That Horror": History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1984) 49, with an excellent discussion of the Erasmian and Biblical background to the idea of the Fool in the play following on pp. 50-53. Cf. the much less relevant discussion of other associations with "fool" in Bloom, Invention of the Human, 493.

66. Calderwood, "Creative Uncreation," 126.

67. Calderwood, "Creative Uncreation," 126 (emphasis in original).

68. Knights, "On the Fool," 122.

69. Coleridge, quoted by J. F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1949) 115. Cf. Bloom, who repeatedly refers to her "recalcitrance" (e.g., Invention of the Human, 508).

70. McFarland, "Image of the Family," 104.

71. Booth, "On the Greatness of King Lear" (1987) 67.

72. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 51.

73. Booth, "On the Greatness of King Lear" (1987) 67.

74. Cf. Schwehn, "King Lear beyond Reason," 31: "But over the course of a lifetime, a pilgrimage, the love between the best parents and the best children can be and often is 'equalized' . . . . Between parents and children, love is a matter of living in a loving manner over time" (emphasis in original).

75. Calderwood, "Creative Uncreation," 126.

76. Calderwood, "Creative Uncreation," 127.

77. Cf. J. Adelman, "Introduction," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 1-21: 4, who points to Edgar's "Christ-like compassion - literally feeling with" (emphasis in original).

78. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 57, suggests that Edgar does this "to alleviate the immediately experienced suffering of Edmund." This is a quite likely interpretation, and furthers emphasizes Edgar's compassion and empathy.

79. Clearly a reference to Christ's suffering: see Basney, "Christian Perspective on Shakespeare," 32. Cf. Adelman, "Introduction," 4-5.

80. Line assigned to Lear as his final line in the Quarto.

81. The observation of Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 289.

82. Cf. Calderwood, 126: "Lacking employment, he grows more and more concerned with practical affairs - the coldness of the night and lack of shelter."

83. Rice, "Empathic Edgar," 52.

84. M. Mack, "The World of King Lear," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed. J. Adelman; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 56-69: 69.

85. K. Muir, "On Christian Values," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. J. Adelman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978) 120.

86. The identification of Barber, "Tragedy of the Sacred," 119.

87. Cf. Bloom, Invention of the Human, 509, who sees no transformation: "Lear's enormous changes, his flashes of compassion and social insight, essentially are emanations of his wholeheartedness, rather than the transformations Bradley and most subsequent critics have judged them to be." Partly this must be some overly fine distinction, as "change" (especially one that is "enormous") and "transformation" are usually taken as synonyms. And partly this is just the observation that there is continuity as well as change in Lear: clearly he is changed (for the better) at the end, and clearly there remains something of the old, explosively emotional Lear.

88. Mack, "The World of King Lear," 57.