Lear, King | William R. Elton (essay date 1966)
William R. Elton (essay date 1966)
SOURCE: "Pagan Atheism: Goneril and Regan, Edmund," in King Lear and the Gods, The Huntington Library, 1966, pp. 115-46.
[In the following excerpt, Elton argues that Goneril and Regan fit the Renaissance conception of pagans and that they are modeled after the Machiavellian villain.]
Renaissance expectation was to view the pagan as "saved," superstitious, or atheistical. Through loose construction of both of these last terms, the superstitious person could in his deviation from the Christian mean also be considered atheistical, and so, by a similar construction, might the converse occur. But, in general, … the two were conventionally paired; the first erred by excessive and irrational fear of the deities, while the second erred by inadequate and too rational regard for the heavenly powers. As the whole problem of Renaissance "atheism" is vexed, suffering, it would seem, from an ambiguous use of terms,...
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