SOURCE: Barber, C. L. “The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness.” In Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 188-202. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1976, Barber argues that Shakespeare offered a “post-Christian” resolution to the symbolic representation of family interaction in his tragedies, particularly in King Lear.]

The loss that we feel in Shakespeare's greatest tragedies is not just the loss of human beings, though that is part of it; nor yet the loss of heroic human beings, though that is a great deal of it. I think our deepest sense in the greatest tragedies is the loss of what one can call the sacred-in-the-human. The qualm of awe we feel comes from the fact that the sacredness the tragedy generates is shown by the logic of the tragic action to be something that human life and society cannot sustain, something indeed that can be destructive, with tragic consequences.

This experience of sacredness does not, in my judgment, involve a religious, supernatural eschatology. On the contrary, it seems to me that Shakespeare's extraordinary relevance to the modern age that began in his period comes partly from his having so consistently done without any religious supernatural. He takes up into his tragedy human needs that might look to religious fulfillment, but the tragic situation he presents is the natural world. He thus presents what one can call the post-Christian situation. One way to put it is that he dramatizes the search for equivalents of the Holy Family of Christianity in the human family.

Shakespeare's art is distinguished by the intensity of its investment in the human family, and especially in the continuity of the family across generations. This investment is extended out into society and up into the royal family. Everything we know about his own family and his relation to it—and we know a great deal, really—is consistent in middle-class terms with what we find in the art, chiefly in aristocratic and royal terms.

The distinctive facts are that he was the son of a tenant farmer's son who rose to eminence in the thriving town of Stratford while Shakespeare was a child, married the youngest daughter and chief heir of his father's yeoman landlord, and then, when Shakespeare was twelve, fell into debt, withdrew from civic life, and lost the bulk of his wife's inheritance. Shakespeare as eldest son joined in the long, heartbreaking, unsuccessful legal struggle to recover his mother's inheritance; in the late nineties he was still involved in legal action in chancery. But meanwhile he had of course succeeded wonderfully, in middle-class terms, by his own role in a booming joint stock company. He pursued personal and family success, not in London nor in court terms, but in Stratford, by going through with his father's earlier application for a coat of arms to make his father and himself gentry, and by buying the property of New Place.¹

One cannot, of course, derive Shakespeare's creative achievement from such facts. But one can, I think, see that the shape of his artistic development is consistent with them. A salient fact is that he did not make tragedy his central form of expression until after he had outdone his father in the rising middle class. Only then did he turn to dramatizing all-or-nothing, male-to-male oedipal conflict and the crucial stresses that relationship to the feminine brings into such conflict. The dramatization was in terms of all-or-nothing issues about rule and royalty, as the meaning of kingship had been developed in the history plays. But it was made in the commercial theater, an independent standing place from which Shakespeare could look with his awesome ironic understanding at the great world and its magic.

Another kind of security was also involved. The dramatist could now risk testing the possibility of becoming the ideal, omnipotent father of infancy: he could begin the major tragedies' expression of the longing for that figure of authority, of the parricidal rage, of the immense anxiety, of the feared destruction. The caste difference between middle-class author and royal subjects obviously contributed to the awe with which figures of authority were invested, in accord with the worshipful patterns of the secular hierarchy. His middle-class difference also contributed to the increasing ironic clarity with which the whole struggle was presented in successive tragedies as Shakespeare managed to get it increasingly under the artistic control of tragic form.

The shift into the preoccupations of the major tragedies can be summarized by the change from a special investment of self in Falstaff to such an investment in Hamlet. Falstaff, as William Empson long ago suggested, relates to Prince Hal somewhat as the speaker of the sonnets relates to the high-born young man, but with “a savage and joyous externalization of self-contempt.”² Hamlet, endowed with wit, imaginative energy, and dramatic resource to the point where, like Falstaff, he tends to come out of the control of the play, is potentially the thing itself, a prince who encounters and must redeem the buried majesty of an ideal royal father, brought back as an immediate presence by the magic of theatrical power.

The matrix of sensibility that Shakespeare brings to his major tragedy can be seen by considering how in the works written before that period—more than half of his production—as well as in the romances after it, Shakespeare characteristically internalized relationships within the family constellation. Marlowe in his middle twenties had already launched heroic drama of titanic oedipal victory, envisaging in Tamburlaine a protagonist taking over a male identity capable of dealing with the stress of suffering beauty by mastering it in mastering the world. “Conceiving and subduing both” was necessary to Marlowe as a defense against surrender to transcendent beauty and power.³ Shakespeare was clearly far less immediately threatened by giving himself. He was not subject to the compulsive need we see in Marlowe to resort to a defensive cruelty, a need that limits the range of Marlowe's art while at the same time giving it its special intensity. How is it that Shakespeare could suffer so much more beauty? Or not need to suffer in giving himself to it?

Shakespeare's earlier work is shaped by a very strong identification with the cherishing role of the parents of early infancy. This is the role the poet adopts in cherishing the young man addressed in the sonnets. Such relationship is grounded most deeply in very early modes of relation, dyadic rather than triadic. Triangular relationships involve a predominantly negative resolution of the Oedipus complex. This orientation is consistent with the almost complete absence, in the early work, of confrontations between sons and fathers—the very thing that is to become central in the first major tragedies. In the early work, there is a very strong tendency to submerge or transcend conflict by identification, so that the sensibility is profoundly sociable. Concern for kinship and kindness extends benign family relationships out into larger contexts of society and nature and focuses on unkindness in violations of family and extended family. Figures of adult male authority in the older generation are characteristically weak or vulnerable, and they command loyalty or sympathy. Active male-to-male rivalry and violence is typically between brothers, or brotherly friends or enemies within the same generation. The chief source of menace, however, is in women. For behind the identification with maternal, cherishing attitudes, motivating it at deep levels, is the danger of being abandoned or overpowered. So a central preoccupation of the early work is with overpowering women—either being overpowered by them or overpowering them.

All these problematic stresses in the family constellation come into the major tragedies. But what is new is their presenting crises of heritage centered in the effort to achieve or maintain a positive resolution of the Oedipus complex, identification with heroic adult male authority. The first major tragedies, Julius Caesar and Hamlet, with Macbeth a little later, center in man-to-man confrontations, tragic struggles to take over heritage and male identity by destroying paternal figures of authority, attempts to destroy them so as to become them—only to find self-destruction in the process. In Hamlet and Macbeth, relationship to women that the hero cannot manage contributes decisively to the tragic failure. In the whole sequence, there is a shift from the slight role of women in Julius Caesar to a greater and greater emphasis on the protagonist's inability to cope with the demands made by or on women, from Othello, through Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. In Timon of Athens there is an abortive attempt to dramatize a man who tries to be the all-providing, feeding parent.

In the first three late romances, Shakespeare turns to dramatizing the fulfillment of the need men have to be validated by feminine presences, now presented as achieved in visionary reunions—reunions anticipated within tragedy in Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. A daughter restored leads to the recovery of a lost wife, Thaisa, Hermione. The finale is a tempest distanced and managed. Prospero gives up the daughter with whom he has been isolated in his cell as Lear dreamt of being isolated in a prison cell with Cordelia. By his “art” he masters a usurping younger brother as well as the temptation to talion violence: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (Tmp. V.i.27-28).⁴ “In my end is my beginning.”

One can summarize the development by reference to different ways of coping with the incest taboo, which is necessarily an urgent problem in such family-centered art and the temperament that produced it. The early work is much preoccupied with diversions of sexual energy embedded in family ties—in cruelty on the one side and tenderness on the other. The Pandora's box of horrors opened in Titus centers on family relations, in blood ties and blood feud. The revenge play structure is used to enact a fantasy that separates overt sexuality, linked with violence, from the family and extreme family loyalty. The menace of maternal sexuality is dealt with by making Tamora, that “unhallowed dam, / Like to the earth, swallow her own increase” (V.ii.190-91)—which is brute sexuality embodied in her rapist sons “baked in this pie” (V.iii.60). The strongest feeling is directed by Titus to a daughter disfigured in a way that is at once sexually disabling and suggestive. Strangely, Titus the official martial hero becomes an embodiment of a maternally cherishing father; the sentimental farewells, after his death, center on his grandson: “Many a time he danced thee on his knee, / Sung thee asleep” (Tit. V.iii.162-63).

Much of the strangeness in the attitudes we find expressed in the sonnets toward the young man becomes comprehensible when one recognizes relationships to parental attitudes, and more deeply still, to childlike feelings of total dependence—in summary, to vertical relationships that originate in the transmission of heritage and identity, as they are now shaping relationships within a single generation or half-generation. The poems to him start out, after all, precisely with this subject. In urging the young man to have a child, the first seventeen poems encourage him to make for himself a renewing mirror image such as the poet soon makes for himself of the young man:

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another …

(Sonnet 3)

The lines describe almost exactly what Shakespeare himself does in later poems with the young man as mirror:

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date …

(Sonnet 22)

The poet's renewal by identification is compared to that of a parent with a child. In one sonnet it is a father:

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

(Sonnet 37)

Or it is the youth's own mother:

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

(Sonnet 3)

Relationship by identification is less familiar from our conscious social experience than relationship to people as objects, because it is less accessible to observation. We observe our objects, but people whom we take into ourselves by identification are matter less for our observation than for our conservation. In fact, as Freud's later writings and more recent studies repeatedly insist, identification is particularly important not only in relationship to parents but generally as a means of dealing with the loss of objects by estrangement or death. And a person lost who has been internalized and so preserved, as well as grieved for, can often be found again in a new object. One of the most extraordinary sonnets makes explicit the beloved's function as heir to earlier attachments:

Thy bosom is endearèd with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposèd dead;
And there reigns love and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought burièd.

(Sonnet 31)

The third quatrain specifies that those lost become “parts of” the poet now projected in the friend:

Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone.
          Their images I loved I view in thee,
          And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

(Sonnet 31)

There is no reference here to parental figures; the earlier figures are “lovers” in the broad Elizabethan sense, but the kind of feeling for them, “dear religious love” calling forth “many a holy and obsequious tear” (ll.6 and 5), is consistent with original familial love.

The poet's identification of himself with the young man, and the passive dedication of himself to dependence on his love, is far more visible than the poet's identification with the cherishing parent, because for the most part the latter is expressed or embodied in the process of creating the sonnet. What is crucial for the whole view of Shakespeare's development in its early stages is that adopting the cherishing role permits a reception of heritage and the maintenance of a self grounded in it, without confronting centrally the problem of manliness. The poet in effect becomes the nurturing parent(s) in his/her/their earliest desirable function, the function that creates and validates life.

This way of maintaining heritage does not involve confronting the self-asserting male egotism of the father. I do not mean to suggest that such a “normal” development was outside Shakespeare's range of feeling and attitude. Freud and others stress that two-sided residues of the oedipal history are normally present in everybody, identifications with the father and with the mother in both their bisexual aspects.

In the comic mode, Shakespeare's strong family orientation comes out early in The Comedy of Errors. He transforms Plautus' libertine male comedy into a thoroughly domestic affair, ending with a moving family reunion presided over by a holy abbess who proves to be the mother. We have also the taming of a shrew, with the abbess' assistance—and soon Petruchio turns Katherina into a good household Kate.

As the festive form of comedy comes into its own, what is dramatized is release from family ties on a tide of communal, seasonal, holiday feeling presided over by benignly masterful young women. The younger generation leaves the family to go out into what Northrop Frye has called “the green world,” to go through something like a saturnalian revel, and in the process to experience a release from family sexual taboos. Release brings clarification about the claims of nature within the natural and generational cycle. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that begins like a festive comedy and dramatizes the failure of the young lovers to escape from destructive family ties after their marvelous moment of release in a liminal world where they leave family names and ties behind.

In the histories of this very productive period, we have men largely without women; in Richard II the feminine presence is “the lap of this green land” on which men struggle. In life, we often first encounter an insuperable problem in thinking that we have solved it. In Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare dramatizes the successful positive resolution of the latent conflict of Hal with his usurper father, with all the resources of social control brought into play, as well as the ritual process of the sacrifice of “that father ruffian,” Falsaff (1H4.II.iv.45). Hal internalizes his father to become, officially, all king and a guiltless man, “the offending Adam” whipped out of him by “Consideration” (H5.I.i.28-29). But as Peter Erickson is showing, in work in progress at this writing, his unresolved passional needs keep coming out in ways that make the underside of him surprisingly like Hamlet. Another young critic, Richard P. Wheeler, who is exploring Shakespeare's development with the problematic comedies as a fulcrum, points out that the separation of genres in this period between male-dominated history and festive comedy with its delightful, enthralling heroines keeps separate areas that come together in the next period of more drastic, deeper conflicts.⁵

The problematic comedies have lost the confident reliance on a community feeling for sexuality as benign and sanctioned by natural rhythms. Sexuality instead is either disassociated from family ties and social sanctions and so a pernicious degradation, as in Measure for Measure, or else it is too closely bound up with having grown up together and remaining under the aegis of the older generation, as with Helena and Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well. Meanwhile, the major tragedies show violence erupting from the pull of family ties that are too close, “more than kin” (Ham.I.ii.65). The whole heroic identity is invested in “holy cords” (Lr. II.ii.76) that have an incestuous content, direct or displaced. The investment is at once ennobling and ironically destructive.

In the late romances, we have symbolic action that, instead of freeing sexuality from the ties of family, works to restore family ties by disassociating them from the threat of degradation by physical incest. The romance mode of presentation insists that the action is symbolic, even though the ecstatic reunions are also actual happenings within a playspace that has been enfranchised by a new understanding of the way magic can work. Murray M. Schwartz has developed the view that the tragedies use up the playspace in which the psyche makes the transition from the world as mother to the larger social world.⁶ Presences without which “the wine of life is drawn” (Mac.II.iii.95) are destroyed by the demand to become or possess them totally. The romances, in Schwartz's splendid formulation, restore the playspace. In the reunions of Pericles and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare finds his way to his composite version of Dante's “Virgine madre, filia del tuo filio.”

II

If I were writing this essay in 1876 instead of 1976, it would be called “Shakespeare: Poet of the Family.” I want to sketch now very briefly how, as I see it, he dramatizes the investment of feeling and need in the human family, by relation to the way that investment is made in the religious worship of God and the Holy Family.

The creation of a new art form puts men in a new relation to their experience. The new repertory theater provided a new location for language and gesture. Human possibilities could be envisaged with the freedom of a special place apart, alternative to the church and to courtly situations. The new vantage point of the audience watching action on a stage made the drama a new organ of culture, a novum organum. It was an agent in the historical shift of the Renaissance and Reformation from a ritual and ceremonial view of life, with absolutist assumptions about meaning and reality, towards a psychological and historical view. The historical understanding Shakespeare develops sees absolutist assumptions motivating relative, dramatic events.

The new theater came into its own a generation after most of the symbolic actions of the Old Religion had been forbidden in England by the Protestant reformers around Elizabeth. Most of its visible embodiments, Christ on the Rood, the saints and the Virgin Mary in statues, paintings and stained glass, had been swept from the churches on orders from the Privy Council in the years immediately preceding Marlowe and Shakespeare's birth in 1564. One of the official homilies, in rebuking the people for not faithfully attending the new service, speaks of their “gross carnal imaginations” missing “the gay gazing sights” of the old worship. One homily denounced “our churches … full of great puppets, wondrously decked and adorned … you would believe our men saints were some princes of Persia with their proud apparel, and the idols of our women saints were nice and well-trimmed harlots.”⁷ Soon there were “gay gazing sights” in the theater, with living puppets and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, self-made prince of Persia, and his captured princess bedecked “with precious jewels of mine own, / More rich and valurous than Zenocrate's” (1 Tamb.,I.ii.292-93). But the trend was not simply secular. If the Old Religion's holy images had been partly secularized, the new theater's secular personages could be invested with meanings cognate to those that had entered into worship: “Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven / … To entertain divine Zenocrate” (2 Tamb., II.iii.2983, 85).⁸

I can imagine no way to prove it, but it seems to me that the very central and problematical role of women in Shakespeare—and in the Elizabethan drama generally—reflects the fact that Protestantism did away with the cult of the Virgin Mary. It meant the loss of ritual resource for dealing with the internal residues in all of us of the once all-powerful and all-inclusive mother. The threatening mother survived as an immediate, physical supernatural presence in Protestant countries after the benign Holy Mother had been drastically reduced in scope and presence—for the terrible mother was still conjured up and pursued with terrible persecution in the witch manias well into the seventeenth century. Keith Thomas, in his fine study Religion and the Decline of Magic, notes that the belief in witches survived in England after many Catholic resources of exorcism had been dispensed with.⁹

Witches proper are of course among Shakespeare's repertory of overpowering women: Joan La Pucelle in a history at the outset, the Weird Sisters in the most intense of all the tragedies. Macbeth, in its complex way, is an exorcism, for it presents the witches as the outstretched shadows of Lady Macbeth and understands their power as depending on masculine insecurity. But they are also objectively supernatural beings. After the Reformation, the benign supernatural figure of the Holy Mother could not be present in a comparable way. Not only was her image gone, but prayers like Sancta Maria Virgo were not taken over from the Lay Folks Prayer Book to the Book of Common Prayer: “Saint Mary, maid of maidens, mother and daughter of the king of kings … holy gate of heaven, set us all in peace, changing the name of Eve … show that thou art our mother.”¹⁰ Hermione is a statue in a chapel before she comes back down into life.

I do not agree with critics who see intimations of a Christian resolution in Shakespeare's tragedy. As I see it, he presents versions of the Oedipus complex tragically unresolved. His tragedies present the post-Christian situation where, with some of the expectations and values of Christianity, we do not have God and the Holy Family, only the human family. In this situation he makes us feel that human life is supremely valuable as well as terrible. The fact that Shakespeare could do this must be one main reason for the rise of bardolatry since the mid-eighteenth century.

The rites of passage of traditional Christianity, Catholic or Anglican, are regularly structured to take people through threshold moments of losing or changing family ties by turning their need for total relationship to Christ and God. This is very clear in the services of baptism, confirmation, marriage, and burial. Shakespeare's mature plays show people in passage from one stage of life to another, succeeding in comedies, failing in tragedies. Some tragedies start with the failure of ritual. In Hamlet it is burial. The service begins with “I am the resurrection and the life (saith the Lord)” to lead the bereft past loss with recognition that we are dust that returns to dust. Hamlet looks for his buried father in the dust; then the father returns from death to ask for a total, uncritical commitment. As in all the tragedies, there is a swerve back to the deepest family ties. And since on its positive side the tie to the father is the core of human and social values, Hamlet's Galilean turbulence is potentially creative as well as terribly destructive.

Lear begins with a failure of the passage that might be handled by the marriage service, as it is structured to persuade the father to give up his daughter. Regan and Goneril, though married, pretend to meet Lear's demand on them in all-but-incestuous terms. Cordelia defends herself by reference to the service:

Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

(I.i.100-04)

Shakespeare presents social arrangements in the Christian terms of his society, and with a critical perspective that implies part of the Christian norm. But only part. The full Christian norm would deal with the need for a complete union in love, the need Lear looked for from Cordelia in his hope “to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (I.i.123-24), by redirecting it to divine objects, with the discipline of humility before God as the condition of being “one with Christ and Christ with us.” What a father would give up in the marriage service would ideally be given compensation in the communion service that immediately followed.

In Catholic worship, there would have been compensation also for him by relationship with the Blessed Virgin, Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven. The relationships toward which the incestuous love tends, to make the daughter a mother, whether by impregnating her or depending totally on her, are shown fulfilled in the traditional Christian scenes of the Annunciation and the Madonna with Child—fulfilled in a sacred way that expresses the latent wishes and protects against acting them out, against pursuing in human objects the total fulfillment reserved for the divine persons. So a Christian Lear might be provided with the Presence whose lack drives him to madness; his daughters might be spared the demand that they be that presence, that all their tenderness be arrogated to a father who asks them to make him, in effect, their god. In the two older daughters, resistance to the demand, in the situation of sibling rivalry, has atrophied their tenderness, making them sexually avid and demonically vengeful, eager to destroy the impossible old man who has destroyed their full humanity.

Obviously Lear's world is not Christian in this full sense. On the contrary, in the opening acts Shakespeare emphasizes pagan, pre-Christian references: “by the sacred radiance of the sun, / The mysteries of Hecate …” (I.i.109-10); “Hear, Nature, hear; dear Goddess, hear …” (I.iv.277). But as we go through Lear's suffering with him, and the sufferings of Gloucester and Edgar, Christian expectations come increasingly into play. By the time Cordelia returns, significantly without her husband, we share with at least part of our sensibility the need she comes to meet. As regularly happens in Shakespeare's mature work, religious language comes into play to express the investment in the family bond:

                                                            There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes,
And clamor moistened. …

(IV.iii.31-33)

What the play presents, however, is not a Christian resolution, but the tragic consequences of this investment. In the scene of Lear's reunion with Cordelia—for me as for many the most moving moment in Shakespeare—Lear's summary image on coming back into sanity is shaped by Christian conceptions: “Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire” (IV.vii.45-48). And in Cordelia's “No cause, no cause,” we get a full expression of Christian love without a Christian supernatural.

How fully Shakespeare understood the destructive side of human bonds, the value of which he so movingly expresses, is manifest in his having changed the happy ending of all his sources. The English win, and among the English Edmund. Lear's great speech in response to that situation is often quoted by those who, caught up in the Christian feeling, want to see the play's ending as wholly redemptive, with intimations of a reunion of father and daughter in a hereafter:

Come, let's away to prison: …
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 take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies …

(V.iii.8-21)

Lear has undergone a discipline of humility and achieved something like Christian disillusion with worldly things, together with a sense of the wrong he did Cordelia. He has seen through royal vanity. But he still wants his daughter “to love [her] father all.” A chasm of irony opens as we realize that he is leading her off to death. His vision of prison amounts, almost literally, to a conception of heaven on earth—his heaven, the “kind nursery” after all.

To talk about what Shakespeare is appealing to (and controlling) in such a moment, one needs to understand the religious traditions or situation he is drawing on, but also the roots of potential religious feeling in the family. For he is presenting the modern situation where religious need, or need cognate to what has been dealt with by worship of the Holy Family, has no resource except the human family and its extensions in society, including the problematic ideal of kingship. William Elton's King Lear and the Gods¹¹ shows how highly relevant religious thought of the period is to the play—notably the idea of a Deus Absconditus. The play's adumbration of religious ritual is exhibited in Herbert Coursen's fine new study of Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies.¹²

For my purposes, psychoanalysis is a useful supplement because it amounts, in some aspects, to a sociology of love and worship within the family, or as derived from the family, especially as experienced in infancy. The experiences of infancy were not, as such, a focus of much analytical attention in Shakespeare's period; our acute consciousness of them goes back to romanticism and develops along with the decreasing hold of religion. Infantile experience as such is also not a major concern of Shakespeare's art, since his culture little regarded it. Yet his plays find equivalents and shape action in ways that, with their central familial preoccupations, can be understood by reference to infantile residues. Thus it is useful, I think, to understand Lear's vision of prison as a regressive wish demanding that Cordelia join in it. In the large design of the play, this tendency of course connects with the childishness and playfulness, often charming and liberating in the midst of anguish, that floods through the Fool's part and flashes in moments of Edgar's impersonation of Mad Tom, as in Lear's own sprightliness in madness. The tendency also relates to Lear's confident assumption at the outset of relationship to a benign Nature, even as he asks the “dear Goddess” to convey sterility into the womb of Goneril—with all the developing ambiguities: Edmund's “lusty stealth of nature” (I.ii.11), Lear's incredulous “Is there any cause in Nature that make these hard hearts?” (III.vi.76-77).

It is surely because the plays are centered so much in family that they can make comprehensible to the widest variety of auditors their enormous range of thought, lore, myth, and literary commonplace (as well as uncommon place). Such matters as the ambiguous status of Nature in the thought of the period, or again the fear that God has withdrawn from the world, need not be understood in systematic terms as we watch the play, fruitful as such understanding is in extending its significance. We understand distinctions that are potentially systematic by reference to the concrete social world and the family center of it: “Why brand they us / With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base? Base? / Who in the lusty stealth of nature …” (I.ii.9-11). So too with Deus Absconditus. One way the theological anxiety is brought home is that God's representative on earth, the king, begins the play by in effect absconding. And he is first and foremost a father. The first, most important order of understanding is “close to home.”

Shakespeare dramatizes the implication of fixation as Cordelia's death—also the result, of course, of a whole complex social process that has been set in motion by Lear's abdicating and dividing authority, by Gloucester's sensuality and credulity, by the brute fact of chance in war. Those who insist on seeing the play as Christian rather than post-Christian have to ignore or “transcend” the fact that the heavens do not respond to the repeated appeals made to them, as by Albany:

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

(IV.ii.47-51)

Heaven's vault merely reverberates Lear's “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” as he enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms. And yet humanity does not simply prey on itself like monsters. Without attempting here to describe the play's extraordinary final effect of affirmation along with tragic loss, the argument I have been indexing needs to be completed by noting that Lear and Cordelia, while they are represented with marvelous understanding as human individuals, also become in effect icons. Lear with Cordelia in his arms is a pietà with the roles reversed, not Holy Mother with her dead Son, but father with his dead daughter. In the new situation, where it was necessary to do without the supernatural figures and refind them in secular manifestations, Shakespeare's art finds new intensity of grace possible in human life, and new intensity of tragic loss. As the plays become part of the ongoing culture, particular figures within particular family constellations become themselves icons important for us, “Presences / That passion, piety or affection knows”:

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia. …

In using the term “icon” about Lear and Cordelia, there is the difficulty that the Christian associations imply an image that stands for something holy which it only represents—for something beyond, transcendent. True, in a holy place an icon can come to be itself holy, something set apart—as with saints' relics, or the icons of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. But it does so in a context of worship and belief. In talking or writing about Shakespeare's use or adumbration of religious language and action, it is easy to slip into implying such a context. And so it is crucial to check the powerful tendency of the Christian vocabulary to imply the whole Christian situation—crucial because his art does so.

Lear and Cordelia do not stand for transcendent persons beyond them—for God and the Virgin. They are themselves finite persons in a finite world. The play generates sacredness about them by the same development that makes their tragic destiny. The sacredness in Shakespeare's tragedy goes with recognition of the human impossibility of being divine, realized by the dread attempt, which brings destruction. The attempt is to have a total relationship, satisfying the assumption of omnipotence of mind—or better, in Lear's case, omnipotence of heart.

To attempt this is to make no difference, to use René Girard's terms, no difference between a daughter and the all-providing mother. Othello makes no difference between the mother and the wife; he makes Desdemona sacred in this way and then destroys her, with Iago's diabolical prompting, on the assumption that if she is a secular woman she will make no difference between him and Cassio (the mother's handkerchief in Cassio's hand is confirmation). His expectations and demands are absolutes: “My soul hath her content so absolute / That not another comfort like to this / Succeeds in unknown fate” (Oth.II.i.189-91). Here again what is lost is the sacred-in-the-human as humanity creates and destroys it.

Notes

1. Samuel Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) makes the significance of the evidence clearer than ever before.

2. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), p. 104.

3. C. L. Barber, “The Death of Zenocrate: ‘Conceiving and subduing both’ in Marlowe's Tamburlaine,” Literature and Psychology, 16 (1966), 15-24.

4. Citations are to The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963, 1972).

5. Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (forthcoming from the Univ. of California Press in 1980. See chapter 4.)

6. Schwartz outlines his view of the development from the major tragedies through the late romances in Chapter 2 of [Representing Shakespeare: New Psycholanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980].

7. Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1816), 2, pp. 8, 219-20. The first passage is cited by Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, 5th ed. (rev.) (London: Burns and Oates, 1963), 3, p. 104.

8. Citations are to The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).

9. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 493-501.

10. I have taken phrases from several prayers to the Virgin Mary in The Prymer or Lay Folks Prayer Book, ed. Henry Littlehales (London: 1895), EETS original series, p. 105.

11. William Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966).

12. Herbert Coursen, Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1976).