[In the following essay, Edwards disagrees with critics who view King Lear as an expression of a godless existence, contending that the play is “an eminently Christian work” that dramatizes human imperfection and the possibility of redemption.]

I

Christians are well placed to know that reading, like writing, is never innocent. How we understand a literary work reveals what we think literature to be (why it exists, what it is doing in the world); it also reveals how we conceive of Christianity. The way successive generations approach particular works and reflect in general on literary practice and theory offers more than a study in cultural history. The variety of opinion shows how important it is to think hard about the basic questions, and especially about what kind of world we believe we are living in.

Consider King Lear. Well before a number of directors and critics of the 1960s interpreted William Shakespeare's play as if it had been written by Samuel Beckett or Jean Genet (having missed, into the bargain, the humanity and the untiring, strangely perceptive religious search of the former), there were comments on its closeness to Seneca's “hopeless fatalism” (Eliot), its “hopeless cry to the deaf Heavens for justice” (Welsford), its displaying of Shakespeare's “uncontrollable despair” (Murry), and its demonstration that “faith has entirely disappeared from Shakespeare's theatre” (Claudel). Algernon Charles Swinburne had already written of its “pessimism.” Yet A. C. Bradley saw Lear as being redeemed through suffering, and there exists any number of Christian allegorizings—Cordelia as a Christ figure, for example, or the mock trial as illustrating the abasing of the mighty and exalting of the humble in the Magnificat—to suggest that the play is simply Christian. Having noted what is surely a bizarre failure to agree, what are we to make of it? What does it mean?

We might begin by seeing that, in provoking such a range of contradictory interpretations (I have touched on only a few), King Lear resembles the world. We might then reflect that it is the fallen nature of the world that causes this hermeneutical disarray, one made worse by our difficulty in focusing on that fallenness with precision. Christians say that humans have sinned, that the earth is “cursed,” and that the wrath of God is “revealed from heaven” as well as His love, but the problem is to see just what that entails. I do not pretend fully to know, but I should like to learn from other people's mistakes, and from Shakespeare.

Nahum Tate's adaptation of the play in 1681 and the Neoclassical rejection of Shakespeare's version, which led to its disappearance from the stage for over a century and a half (from 1681 to 1838), have received more criticism than they can bear, yet, however foolish we may find that shying away from King Lear, it retains its interest. Tate must have felt that his “new-modelling” of the work so as to allow it properly to “at once divert and teach the Mind” not only turned it into better theatre but also made it more Christian. And to have Lear recover his kingdom, pass his crown to Cordelia, and retire to a “cool cell” so as to spend the rest of his life in meditation with Gloster and Kent, while Cordelia reigns with her husband Edgar, does look from one perspective satisfyingly Christian. When the last line claims Cordelia as the radiant proof “That truth and virtue shall at last succeed,” we are likely to dissent not from the statement itself but from the vacuity of the play's attempt to sustain it. But what is the perspective from which such an ending, such a solution to a complex of vital problems, can be thought to comply with what a Christian believes? If it were only a matter of shallow optimism, we could dismiss it. That it is much more shows, for example, in this 1715 comment of Lewis Theobald on King Lear itself: “Virtue ought to be rewarded, as well as vice punished, but in their deaths [those of Lear and Cordelia] this moral is broke through.” It is easy to protect oneself from Tate's vanity and from his and Theobald's Neoclassical commonplaces—too easy, because the moral government of the world that they presume is a kind of hallucinated and hallucinating order, which always threatens Christianity and from which we have different ways of failing to escape. Theobald clearly believes that, if his moral is once “broke through,” the very notion of providence is under threat and, to touch on what seems to have been a genuine terror of the time, order could revert to confusion, creation to chaos. Such concerns may be for us merely objects of scholarly inquiry, but how many Christian spectators and readers conclude that Beckett is a nihilist because Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, and he never comes, without considering that Christians have been waiting for two thousand years for Jesus to return, and he never does? We all screen ourselves from the most troublesome truths of our faith, in one way or another, according to our temperament and the temper of the times.

An hallucinated order is what Christians create for themselves whenever the import of the expulsion from Eden, of a world awry, of our unflagging desire to sin, becomes too much to bear. And that is what makes Samuel Johnson's response to King Lear so endlessly interesting. For one thing, he clearly entered into the play not less but more fully than most. The famous passage on the really scandalous element of the play—“And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor”—far from being an example of eighteenth-century sensiblerie, shows his capacity to relieve a literary work deeply within himself, while being aware of what it bodes for the meaning of life on earth and, in this case, for the distresses that the future may hold. Johnson's restraint, and modesty as to how his private feelings could matter to anyone else, can make John Keats's response to the play seem Romantic and almost overdone: “For, once again, the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay / Must I burn through”—except that this “burning,” one realizes, was genuine and the enduring of King Lear essential to Keats's finding himself as a man and as a poet.

It is Johnson's more general comment on Cordelia's death that concerns my argument:

Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles. … A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life; but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play wise; or that, if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.

What strikes me first in this other frequently quoted passage is that, as far as I can see, everything that Johnson says is correct, with the exception of those “natural” ideas and that “natural” love of justice. These are surely eighteenth-century intrusions into Christianity, worldly hallucinations that, when taken much further than Johnson took them, became for a while a powerful and surreptitious means of denying consequences of the Fall. Johnson notes Shakespeare's “strange” and therefore purposive decision to invent Cordelia's death. He is perfectly aware that, in the world we experience as opposed to the world we imagine to exist as a fulfillment of our wishes, justice is not observed; and by including the prosperity of the wicked as well as the miscarrying of the virtuous, he extends his clear-sightedness further than the play requires, since the “wicked” characters are in fact thwarted and all, without exception, die. (There is also a formidable strength of character, given the absence from the passage of any gloating on evil, cynicism, or even pessimism, and a weight of inheld emotion expressing itself in the quiet statement that flagrant injustices in life are “common” events.) In supposing also that audiences gain greater pleasure from the triumph than from the downfall of “persecuted virtue,” Johnson would seem to be simply right, yet he does not inquire whether such pleasure is warranted (this is where the danger of believing in a “natural” love of justice begins to appear), and by arguing not that the observing of justice makes a play better but that it does not make it worse, he seems to want a literary work to supply the order that the world itself lacks. One can hardly say that he is wrong. Having experienced Shakespeare's imagination as so “powerful [a] current … that the mind which once ventures within it is hurried irresistibly along,” and having passed through events that “fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope,” one does indeed want to feel that all this conflictual activity is ultimately ruled by the play's own order. To wish, however, that this aesthetic order in the form correspond to a moral order in the fictive world displayed through that form could become, should it be carried further that Johnson's discrimination and vigilance would be likely to carry it, the desire for the work of art itself to constitute an hallucinated order, a satisfyingly structured other world to save us from the confusion of this one. In contrast, a perfectly ordered play that pushes to a limit the moral discomposure of a world where good and evil are inextricable would both respect the facts and convey the aspiration toward order as what it is: the desire to overcome an immense loss and a present lack, and the recognition of an as yet unobtainable transcendence. Such, it seems to me, is Shakespeare's King Lear.

II

For instance, what happens to prayers to the gods in the play, and how do we react? On learning that it was Edmund who betrayed him, Gloucester cries: “O my follies! Then Edgar was abused? / Kind gods, forgive me that and prosper him” (3.7.90-91). Maybe what is most important here is that Gloucester repents, asks forgiveness, and prays for someone else's welfare only moments after being blinded, and that, despite his earlier appeal “O you gods!” (3.7.69) not having been heard, he yet calls the gods “kind.” His instantaneous descent into himself followed by an equally rapid opening of his mind to the gods and to his son, in the sudden new world of pain and darkness, suggests that he is responding to a powerful act of grace, should we care to think in those terms. When Gloucester meets Poor Tom, gives him a purse, and prays thus,

                                                                                                    That I am wretched
Makes thee the happier. Heavens deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly. …

(4.1.68-72)

his willingness to be wretched for the sake of another person and his respect for heaven's ordinance about helping others can make us conclude that what he said only a moment earlier about the gods who treat humans as wanton boys treat flies, killing them for their sport (4.1.38-39), was merely a passing dejection, and that only the unforgettable sharpness of the simile has persuaded readers to pluck the lines from their context and to assume that Shakespeare agreed with them. A few scenes later Gloucester will pray to “You ever gentle gods” (4.6.213).

The point at issue, however, is whether or not prayers are answered, and we may think, if we wish, that Gloucester's petition for Edgar to “prosper” is eventually heard, after the many travails through which he has still to pass, when he defeats Edmund and becomes, seemingly, King of Britain. When Albany begins to dread that, unless the heavens send down their “visible spirits” to tame Goneril and Regan, humanity will sink to preying on itself like monsters of the deep (4.2.47-51), one can imagine that the heavens do finally stop the sisters, though with less striking means, by having them die. But one can also imagine that they do not and that the sisters bring about their own destruction; in any case the passage no longer figured in the Folio. And what of Lear's madness? His old man's prayer is moving and insistent, “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper, I would not be mad” (1.5.44-45, Folio), but it goes unanswered. On the other hand, Cordelia's prayer—her only prayer—for his madness to be healed, “O you kind gods! / Cure this great breach in his abused nature” (4.7.14-15), is very probably heard, since he is cured within a few minutes. Yet one can believe also that the cure is effected not by the gods but by the sleep-inducing simples prescribed for him.

All these prayers leave room for interpretation. Kent's indirect prayer, however, on witnessing Gloucester's offer to shelter Lear despite the evident danger to himself—“The gods reward your kindness” (3.6.5)—can only be intended to cause a shudder, since we know that Gloucester is shortly to be blinded and thrown out of doors. Gloucester's sacrifice, his later warning to Kent to save Lear from a death plot, and his earlier resolution to side with the king in the coming war all lead to hardly conceivable suffering, which no gods prevent, though that is after all the meaning of sacrifice. One needs to look a long way ahead—to his finding of Edgar and of himself, and to his death between joy and grief when his heart bursts “smilingly” (5.3.198)—before being able to think that Kent's prayer may in the end be answered. And no such doubt surrounds the two prayers for Cordelia's safety that most exercise critics and that are, indeed, the crucial ones. By the ending we may have forgotten Kent's on her being disinherited, “The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid” (1.1.183), but Albany's “The gods defend her” (5.3.254) is followed immediately by the entrance of Lear carrying her body. Those prayers are certainly not answered, and none of the play's prayers is answered certainly: the gods do nothing to save Gloucester's eyes or Lear's mind; they also allow Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund to do their worst.

One nonetheless can believe that Cordelia is heard and that other prayers are answered ultimately and according to the gods' own intentions. So the first question to ask oneself is surely why it is possible to explain the fate of the prayers in different ways, and also why it is possible to conclude, reasonably, either that the gods are finally shown to be overseeing the action or that the sky is empty and the characters' piety an illusion. We touch here, it seems to me, not on some definitive instability of literary texts but on a quality of Shakespeare's art. For how can a Christian writer guarantee the reply of the heavens? He devises his characters and the world they move in, but not the God or the gods on whom they believe themselves to depend. Shakespeare shows his characters praying on an extraordinarily large number of occasions, not at prayer but turning spontaneously to the gods out of the events that come upon them, and by leaving what happens to nearly all their supplications undertermined he exercises, I suggest, another kind of “Negative Capability”—a willingness to remain in doubt and to refrain from obliging even pagan gods to do his bidding. The result, surely, is that the world of King Lear resembles very closely, if one wishes to see it in this way, the world of the Christian, where some prayers seem to be answered, others to be answered much later and in ways that one had not foreseen, while others—for the avoidance of war, for example, or against the death of someone close—are clearly (if this is quite the word) refused. When “the gods” allow Cordelia to be murdered, moreover, we might reflect that not only does Christianity not say that prayers are always answered, in the manner looked for, but also that salvation depends on an unanswered prayer, however quickly withdrawn. The Christian owes his life to the silence in heaven that follows these words of Jesus: “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me” (Mark 14:36).

If Shakespeare abstains, as much for the good of the play as out of religious conviction, from showing the gods responding to prayer, he equally avoids meddling with providence. The characters are endlessly interpreting what happens to them in terms of the supposed activity of the gods, but are they right? We are likely to welcome Albany's explanation of Cornwall's death at the hands of an outraged servant for having blinded Gloucester: “This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge” (4.2.79-81). We may equally warm to his describing the deaths of Goneril and Regan as “This judgement of the heavens” (5.3.230). Nothing in the play disproves him, but how could one check? When Edgar says this to Edmund, on the other hand, about their father,

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. …

(5.3.168-71)

critics usually demur, and I am sure they are right. It is true that we cannot tell exactly what Shakespeare would think of such a judgment, and it has even been compared to the book of Wisdom—“Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished” (11:6)—as if Edgar's insight was unproblematically attuned to religious truth, albeit apocryphal. Yet there is a distance between the general expression of a moral and spiritual principle and its application to an individual, about whose relation with God no one is in a position to judge. While it is clear that Gloucester's adultery, like Lear's nonsensical choice, unleashes a series of horrors and that the play explores the presence in human acts of uncovenanted consequences, Gloucester's blinding is no more a punishment appropriate to his fault than is Lear's madness to his deed of folly. The passage from the “dark” place of Gloucester's sin to the dark world of his blindness (which may also evidence a great compassion, a long-meditated struggle to understand that immense loss) creates a striking image but also constitutes an argument where an imaginative link has supplanted logical connection. By placing Edgar's commentary on Gloucester's blindness quite close to Albany's commentary on the sisters' deaths, Shakespeare may be inviting us to reflect on the arbitrary nature of all readings of the acts of God, even those we find congenial.

Or rather, aside from any hypothetical intention of persuading others, Shaespeare refrains from pretending to know what the gods are doing; he is not plagued by “any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (1:193), to quote again from John Keats's “Negative Capability” letter of 21 December 1817, since he recognizes that a playwright cannot put himself in the place of God. Perhaps in reaction to the insistent but surface Christianity of the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir that he is rewriting, Shakespeare declines as much to punish vice as to reward virtue. This may even explain the disappearance, between the Quarto and the Folio, of two passages where the providential accounting for events is nonetheless quite discreet. I have already cited Albany's declaration that humanity will become monstrous if the heavens fail to restrain Goneril and Regan. Following Gloucester's blinding, two servants affirm that if Cornwall “come to good” every wickedness is permitted and that women “will all turn monsters” if Regan dies of natural causes (3.7.98-101). If it was Shakespeare who removed these passages, it may have been so as to make the intervention of the gods in the deaths of Cornwall and of the sisters even more uncertain.

The play is concerned less with interpreting events than with probing the ways in which events are interpreted, at a time when the “new philosophy” gave the act of interpretation a new interest and urgency. Not only does Gloucester seek to understand the troubles of the kingdom by means of astrology (“These late eclipses in the sun and moon” [1.2.103-04]), but Lear also takes it for granted that “the operation of the orbs” determines our life and death (1.1.112-13); even Kent can find no explanation for the difference between Cordelia and her sisters other than that “The stars above us govern our conditions” (4.3.34). We listen to the explanations that the characters supply—from Gloucester's charge that the gods harm us for their pleasure to Albany's confidence in heavenly justice—and their words instruct us not about the government of the world but about themselves. When Edgar tries to persuade Gloucester that “the clearest gods” (and what a superb adjective that is!) have saved him from death in his supposed fall from the cliff (4.6.73-74), should we believe that the gods have indeed preserved him, through the agency of Edgar, from committing suicide? Or should we think that Edgar, who also says of the gods that they “make them honours / Of men's impossibilities” and who thereby quotes, as it were, the Bible (“The things which are impossible with men are possible with God” [Luke 18:27]), is attempting to turn his father's thoughts towards the gods' goodness without really assuming that any special providence was at work preventing his death? By this sanctified lie we enter above all into the relationship of the son to the father and into the equally “clear” character of Edgar.

It may be the same wise abstention that leads Shakespeare to avoid giving any passage to Cordelia elucidating events with reference to divine agency. What she does say is this: “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, / Who covert faults at last with shame derides” (1.1.282-83). Cordelia knows that all wrongs finally come to light, and she can see that her sisters' intriguing will soon be evident; but, rather than involving the gods in her prediction, she speaks of what she knows—of the action, within the world, of time. Yet, if Shakespeare seems concerned to limit himself to natural events (there are no supernatural interventions in King Lear, as there are in Hamlet and Macbeth) and to what can be known through human experience, it does not follow that he is writing a purely human play with no concern for the existence or nonexistence of “the gods.” It is by what must have been a voluntary choice that he resists involving providence as much as he resists deciding which prayers are answered. Jean-Paul Sartre objected (rightly or wrongly) that, in showing his characters to be under the sway of providence, Francois Mauriac interfered with their liberty. One might say of Shakespeare that he refuses to interfere with the liberty of the gods and with the freedom of God. This is a further dimension of his Negative Capability, which seems to me both immensely instructive and profoundly Christian.

III

Restraint, however, does not imply neutrality. We read the play as we choose, not because of the indeterminacy of the work but because of our limitations and the perspective on the world that we have adopted, and to some readers what I have written of “the gods” will look like special pleading. Maybe it is. Yet numerous Christian hints are demonstrably present in the play—even Oswald, when he thinks that he is about to kill Gloucester, allows him a moment to recall his sins: “Briefly thyself remember” (4.6.225)—and it has been suggested that by such shafts of alien thought Shakespeare opens the pagan universe of the play to the illumination of what he must have considered to be Christian truth.

I should like to propose another such moment, partly with a view to seeing what is involved in accepting or rejecting it, and what it says about the world as fallen and about how literature might respond. Suddenly confronted with Poor Tom, Lear can only suppose in his madness that Tom's daughters have abandoned him: “Judicious punishment, 'twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters.” To which Poor Tom/Edgar replies: “Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill, / Alow, alow, loo, loo!” (3.4.73-76). What is going on here? Edgar could be quoting from a song, though none has been found, and the simple meaning of this piece of apparent foolery may be that the cock crows on a hill or a dunghill with a sound like “alow, alow, loo, loo.” Yet “Pillicock” is evidently provoked by “pelican,” and while editors have noted the relation between the pelican, which was thought to feed its offspring on its own blood, and Lear's sense of having sacrificed himself for his daughters, no one as far as I know has reflected on the fact that the pelican was a traditional and well known symbol of Jesus, to the point of being depicted on top of the Cross in representations of the Crucifixion. Theologians saw an allusion to Jesus in Psalm 102:6: “I am like a pelican of the wilderness.” The cock also was associated with the Passion, because of the cock that Jesus said would crow after Peter's denial. Could Edgar be thinking: “Pelican sat on Golgotha hill”? I have had this interpretation in mind for such a long time (since Rodney Hillman suggested it to me when we were both students at Cambridge) that I may simply be looking for arguments to support it. But the following line also conjures up the Crucifixion. Where others hear, perhaps correctly, the crowing of the cock, a cry in hunting or in falconry, or the refrain of a song, I hear Jesus' cry on the Cross, which is equally unintelligible until it is explained: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [Mark 15:34]). If this is Lear's first sight of the Bedlam beggar, it is also Edgar's first sight of the king wandering—his wits loose, attended only by the Fool and the disguised Kent—across open country in a storm. The least one could say in defense of this reading is that, faced with the bewildering degradation of Lear to add to his own betrayal and voluntary abasement, Edgar not inappropriately reacts with the deepest thought at the playwright's disposal (I shall return to this anachronism) and interprets his new knowledge with reference to the most signal example of such suffering.

Even if this is what they imply, the lines are in no way solemn. “Pillicock” also means penis; “hill” may refer to the mount of Venus. One remembers that the whole play emerges from a casual discussion in the opening scene of Gloucester's adultery. Yet the Christian seriousness of the moment, if that is what we hear, is in no way diminished by the presence of this vulgar and half-hidden sexuality, any more than by the outlandish obliqueness in the naming of Jesus and the imitation of his cry. On the contrary, what is more Christian than this Crucifixion appearing in the midst of madness, this howl of dereliction reduced to meaningless syllables and accompanied by pornographic innuendo, this Passion humiliated by all the circumstances to which it is exposed? What is more Christian than this possibility of redemption, if that is what it is, arising, suddenly and barely audibly, amid the dispossessed king, the half-wit, and the beggar? Shakespeare, evoking the “foolishness” of the Cross, does so foolishly; he refers to a suffering greater than that of Lear and Poor Tom and serving, perhaps, as a measure of all the sufferings of the play, without allowing it to signify itself clearly. He introduces the idea of salvation into a pagan world in the most appositve way—as a message deformed and hardly comprehensible.

The instant spark from “pelican” to “Pillicock,” the vertiginous fathoming and unprecedented expressing of the Crucifixion and of its relation to the reality of the Fall, make this passage for me one of the most charged in our literature. Though Edgar, living in the eighth century b.c., could know nothing of Jesus, he yet continues to speak, almost immediately, of things he cannot know: “Take heed o'the foul fiend; obey thy parents, keep thy word justly, swear not, commit not with man's sworn spouse, set not thy sweetheart on proud array” (3.4.78-80). He quotes the catechism in the Prayer Book, beginning with the renunciation of the devil and repeating several of the Ten Commandments in a disorder appropriate, once again, to this scene of tragic madness on a storm-swept heath. In the dense knot of meaning that Shakespeare is creating during these few moments, not in spite but by means of the tangled language of his mock madman, we pass from the Crucifixion to entrance into the Christian faith; and scholarly reference to Shakespeare's use, for the creation of Poor Tom, of Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures will not help us understand Edgar's obsession with the devil. He enters crying “the foul fiend follows me” (3.4.45), and when, immediately after his catechizing, Lear asks him “What hast thou been?” he embarks on a lengthy confession in which he imagines himself as having broken the Commandments, descended to the level of the animals, and wallowed in deadly sins before again urging Lear to “defy the foul fiend” (3.4.45-46). Having once resolved “To take the basest and most poorest shape” (2.2.178), and having become “a poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.105-06), he seems to realize that he is capable of all the vices—or that humans are—and that a spiritual power is at work fomenting them. As the tragedy reaches a kind of paroxysm, Edgar and Shakespeare point to the existence of two superhuman forces, the cause of evil and the love that overcomes evil, not to involve the play in Christian allegory or to impair it with intrusive theology, and in such a way that spectators are perfectly free to avoid those hints if they wish.

If my reading of the Pillicock jingle is correct, it emphatically does not mean that Edgar, Lear, or anyone else is a Christ figure, nor does it indicate that Edgar is knowingly referring to the Cross. It means that Shakespeare allows himself to refer to that vast event, which is not out of proportion to his play. The reference is entirely earned by the real extremes of evil, suffering, and devotion in which his imagination involves us, whereas Perillus's reference in the True Chronicle History of King Leir to him “that saved us all from death” is a mere pious bubble, which illuminates neither the play nor the Cross, and which plies us with no new human experience to undergo and try to understand. Shakespeare's way of sinking an allusion to Jesus into nonsense and folly also says more about the fallen condition of the world than could any overt statement. It is that fallen condition that Edgar goes on to perceive with a quite terrible clairvoyance. In these lines from his short soliloquy at the beginning of act 4,

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best,
The worst returns to laughter.

(4.1.3-6)

a modern spectator or reader is unlikely to feel involved, since the wheel of fortune is no longer among the figures by which we seek to explain, and in a way control, the vicissitudes of experience by giving them an agreed and universal form. We shall probably note that Edgar, having reached, as he believes, the lowest position of the wheel's turn, sees himself between lamentation and laughter, and so, we might add, between tragedy and comedy, and this may lead (as well as to thoughts about the relation of tragedy to comedy) to the reflection that the Crucifixion does indeed give way to the Resurrection, that the deepest darkness is finally pierced by light. Yet Shakespeare is surely involving his own spectators in some such false assurance, since, as we know, Edgar is mistaken: there is worse to come, and it comes on the instant with the arrival of the blind Gloucester led by a servant. Edgar does more than learn that he is not yet at the bottom of his fortunes:

O gods! Who is't can say ‘I am at the worst’?
I am worse than e'er I was. …
And worse I may be yet; the worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

(4.1.27-30)

He not only discovers (in these Germanic and monosyllabic lines where Shakespeare reaches down to what feels like the essential core of English so as to say something starkly true) that one can always descend lower into wretchedness but that there is no limit to that descent—that “the worst is not” or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins phrases it at the beginning of a “terrible sonnet” in which, like Keats, he returns again and again to King Lear as a way of understanding his situation, “No worst, there is none.” In human experience there is no “worst.” We can always fall further; the gulf is unimaginably deep.

So what are the implications of that thought for literature and for King Lear? One, surely, is that Cordelia may die. The passage from Edgar reassured that he has plunged as far as he can to the sudden appearance of the blinded Gloucester is repeated even more forcefully in the tragedy's (almost) final move from the repentance of Edmund to the entrance of Lear with the dead Cordelia in his arms. Many readers have felt that her death destroys all the values of love, service, and self-knowledge that the play has so painfully wrought out of misery after misery. In what kind of play should we be, however, and in what kind of world, if the action were to end with act 4, when Lear has been cured (possibly by the “kind gods”) and reconciled to his daughter, when Gloucester has been prevented from suicide and is ready to submit himself to the will of the “ever gentle gods,” when Cornwall has been killed, and when Edgar in possession of Goneril's letter is in a position to ruin both her and Edmund? Or if it ended before Cordelia's death? What act 5 adds is Regan's declaring herself sick, Edmund's being arrested, Goneril's despairing, Edmund's confessing his crimes, Gloucester's discovering his son as his helper, Regan's dying from poison, Goneril's confessing the murder of her sister (has this confession been noticed?) before her suicide, and Edmund's meaning to do “Some good.” Not only might we conclude, as with the older True Chronicle History of King Leir and Tate's adaptation, that this is too good to be true and, however terrible, not fully tragic, but that if Edgar is right one can never cease in principle to discover worse outrages than those already revealed. At the moment when critics claim, in effect, that we have reached the worst and that Lear's defeat, his descent into second childhood, and the imprisonment of his daughter have surely exhausted the miseries that he can be asked to suffer, something like the death of Cordelia needs to occur to remind us of what we thought we had learned. Not, I am sure, that Shakespeare is thinking in these didactic terms. He is exploring and forcing to the brink his own insight—no doubt suffering the death of Cordelia more keenly than his keenest critics, and reinforcing both the pain and the meaning of her death by the fact that it is not intrinsic to the play, that she might have been saved had Edmund spoken earlier, and that his delay is not even entirely understandable.

If we object to Cordelia's death not on exclusively aesthetic grounds but because it is too much both for the play and for our sense of life, we have missed, it seems to me, the meaning of the Fall. And there is a way of accepting her death that is equally, in the end, self-protective. Bradley writes of

… the feeling that what happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she is. … The force of the impression … depends on the very violence of the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and Cordelia's soul. The more unmotivated, unmerited, senseless, monstrous, her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her. The extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong; that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the outward is nothing and the inward is all.

(271-72)

In many ways this is well said: it is irrelevant to Cordelia's worth whether or not she knows worldly success and at what age she dies. To claim, however, that what happens to her “does not matter” not only risks diminishing and even removing the jolt to the mind when we see her dead, but it also denies the force of what Edgar has understood; it further suggests that death is no longer an affliction once we have discerned what the true values are and realized that they survive the disappearance of individuals. Perhaps if we were in a position to “see things as they are,” by which I take Bradley to mean seeing them as God does or as one might hereafter in heaven, death would appear as a passing shadow in the story of a life. But, from where we are, death is still a condemnation, an evil, a breach in a creation originally “good.” To say that ultimately Cordelia's death does not matter is like saying that Jesus' death does not matter—and about his death one could construct an even more persuasive argument, since it occurred for everyone's good. Cordelia's death matters because, by conceiving it and creating a further level of suffering for Lear, Shakespeare presses his understanding of tragedy and, more than that, of the reality of the world he lives in, as far as it will go.

IV

So what could make a literary work incompatible with Christianity? No atrocity, no agony, no despair would do so in itself, since in the world of waiting between Eden and a “new heaven and a new earth” evil is endless as far as we can see. The most resolutely immoral, derisory, or absurd work is perfectly true as soon as one has a perspective on it. Perhaps, then, one should ask: what makes a literary work truly rather than superficially Christian? Once again, King Lear is the text to study. It would require another essay to show exactly why, but consider the gradual enlightenment of Lear, beginning with the first moment of self-knowledge, “I did her wrong” (1.5.24), so simply expressed and arising with utter suddenness, as if coming from elsewhere, amid the riddling questions of the Fool. Whatever happens to Lear, his growing sense of guilt and his acknowledgment of others' suffering are surely more Christian, more suggestive of real hope and actual possibility, than his final happiness in the True Chronicle History of King Leir and in Tate. Or consider Edgar's brief and overwhelmingly suggestive reply to Albany's question as to how he has known his father's miseries: “By nursing them, my lord” (5.3.180). One would need to reflect on the whole story of Edgar, who finally emerges from the subplot to take over the kingdom as Lear's godson and the person whom Lear has “named” (2.1.91-92), to see just how the play contradicts the Fall and works, lucidly and steadily, toward Recreation. And consider, above all, Edmund's repentance. He has heard Edgar recount his wayfaring with Gloucester, his begging for him and Gloucester's blessing; he has heard of Kent's fidelity to Lear and of his approaching death; he has listened to how others have coped with his own and the sisters' villainies. These are all stories of which he was ignorant and which must seem to occur in another world from his own, and he says: “I pant for life. Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (5.3.241-42). Note the suggestiveness of this simple precision: if Edmund wills to do good in spite of his nature, what is giving him the power to do so?

If the world is fallen, what makes a work Christian is surely whatever counteracts the Fall, whatever we find to be present in the world despite ourselves: love, pardon, acknowledgment of guilt, a desire to follow the good that seems to come from beyond the resources of the individual. Prayers being answered and events turning out according to religious correctness may suggest the external action of providence. Devotion, repentance, and conversion suggest the internal action of grace. One may sense that a writer is manipulating providence for honorable ends. One may sense the same manipulation when a character repents, since God does not actually intervene in a literary work, but at least a character who confesses and asks forgiveness interprets his own actions and does not go about interpreting God's. That is why, despite the unceasing accumulation of evils (accompanied, nevertheless, by the gradual removal of all the evil characters, including the Captain who hangs Cordelia), King Lear is surely an eminently Christian work, whose faith and hope are not in a future world but in this world where, if God seems absent, grace is present. It is through resolving, to adapt Edgar's phrase in the final lines, to “speak what he feels, not what he ought to say,” that Shakespeare is able to adventure so far beyond Christian commonplaces, and so unreservedly into Christian truth.

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