George Orwell's statement that although much speculation has been done about Shakespeare's religious beliefs, “it would be difficult to prove that he had any,” is relevant to this theme. The references to anything beyond “this world” in King Lear are consistent with the belief systems of the distant, pagan past. But even if a moral power is operating in this remote (but still timeless) realm, it is not one that can be associated with traditional ideas of spirituality. At times the characters appeal to “the gods,” but above all this is a human drama in which this world is presumably the only realm that matters. When Edmund says, “Thou, Nature, art my goddess,” he means precisely that the material world is what he worships and is all that matters to him. Though he's defeated, it would almost seem that in this line, he's expressing a key notion that accounts for much of the tragedy as it unfolds.

It was not until the nineteenth century that King Lear as Shakespeare conceived it came into its own as an iconic work. From the late seventeenth century until the Romantic period, the standard version of the play performed was the revision by the seventeenth-century dramatist Nahum Tate, in which a “happy ending” where Cordelia and Lear survive was tacked onto the play. It required the Romantic mindset, which was primarily secular and pessimistic, finally to restore the original conclusion. The non-concrete, fantasy-like aspect of King Lear was, as well, not understood by the rational zeitgeist of the entire period from the Restoration through the eighteenth-century age of neoclassicism and Enlightenment. It's not an exaggeration that since the Romantic period began, through to our own time, the message of most artistic works has at least implied that life must be seen in purely human terms. King Lear is a drama that satisfies this requirement, and much of its high status over the past two hundred years is due to the strikingly effective way it conveys a secular theme, though doing so amid the trappings of fantasy and of a mystical, unfathomable power that controls the universe.