[In the essay below, Fortin asserts that a Christian reading of King Lear is as compatible with the “facts” of the play as a secular one, but that neither one is authoritative. Noting that the death of Cordelia is the principal impediment for Christian interpreters, he suggests that the play's ending, far from contradicting Christian doctrine, confirms the Catholic and Protestant notion of God's judgments as unknown and inexplicable.]

Attempts to redeem King Lear by appealing to intimations of Christian transcendence in the play have been summarily, if not vehemently, dismissed by secular critics. Christian critics, we are told by W. R. Elton and others, are simply wrong because they do not attend to the “facts” of the play; seeking to escape the dire significances of the tragic vision, they are in effect guilty of wishful thinking, of imposing their own a priori assumptions upon the play. “The record” of Lear interpretations, says Nicholas Brooke, “is of a long series of strenuous efforts to circumvent the pain; and it is accompanied by a will to release large and encouraging affirmations once the pain is evaded.”¹ Brooke insists that the greatness of King Lear derives, rather, from the “perfect completion of its negation and in the superb energy with which it is enforced” (p. 77).

Recently, however, René Wellek has posed an intriguing question: whether it is possible to conclude that there is indeed a single correct interpretation of the tragedies.² Wellek's question is worthy of further consideration, for perhaps the root of the controversy between secular critics and “Christian” critics is the fact that our criticism lacks a solid hermeneutical base. It is quite evident that the typical interpretation of King Lear (and of the other tragedies as well) is offered as the “right” interpretation, setting forth the meaning of the tragedy all would derive if they would only see the plays aright. But perhaps we are now ready to awaken from our dogmatic slumber and reexamine the implicitly Lockean assumptions which have governed our critical practice. For time after time in the past several decades we have been cautioned that perception and cognition are highly complex activities and that the perceiving eye and mind are actively engaged in constituting or shaping the truth they are naively supposed merely to register.³ The conceptual model of a purely objective critical encounter, such as that called for by Morris Weitz (a model which would have the critic as spectator attempting to “see the object exactly as it is”), seems highly questionable at this time.⁴ It is now almost de rigueur in critical essays to offer ritual obeisance to E. H. Gombrich and his demonstration that our vision is largely a matter of projection, of seeing only what we are prepared to see.⁵ Specifically in literature the now familiar paradigm of the “included spectator” indicates an awakening to the creative participation of the viewer of a play,⁶ while Norman Rabkin's view of the complementarity of Shakespearean meanings has made remarkable inroads; Shakespearean structure, Rabkin tells us, sets up “the opposed elements as equally valid, equally desirable, and equally destructive, so that the choice the play forces the reader to make becomes almost impossible.”⁷ Specifically about King Lear, Rabkin states, “We find ourselves able at almost any point in the play to read it as godless or divine; these are the terms implicit in the action of King Lear and explicit in its language.”⁸ E. D. Hirsch, who has been a stalwart defender of “objective interpretation,” nonetheless concedes the shaping role of the interpreter:

The object of interpretation is precisely that which cannot be defined by the ontological status of a text, since the distinguishing characteristic of a text is that from it not just one but many disparate complexes of meaning can be construed. … the object of interpretation is no automatic given, but a task that the interpreter sets himself. He decides what he wants to actualize and what purpose his actualization should achieve.⁹

In this context Marvin Rosenberg's condescending observation about the “redemptionist” readers of King Lear impresses me as especially provocative: “All this [devastation] cannot prevent those who will from seeing exaltation in Lear's final vision of Cordelia's death, or from believing that what Lear has learned was worth the suffering. We perceive what we are prepared to, need to, perceive” [italics mine].¹⁰ Rosenberg goes on, of course, to dismiss such a response as tawdry sentimentality and to offer the real, objective truth about King Lear, that it is a play which ends in totally unrelieved “general woe” (p. 326).

Rosenberg's observation, however, raises the intriguing question whether it is only the “redemptionist” readers who are to be numbered among “those who will”; for it is difficult to determine precisely how the secular critics can lay claim to an epistemological transcendence denied other critics. Perhaps we have here, as Maynard Mack has suggested, merely a sentimentality of a different kind.¹¹ I do not propose, I hasten to add, that secular readings of King Lear are wrong; indeed they are often quite persuasive and should be heeded. I wish rather to suggest that to consider the secular reading as exclusively valid is as much an act of dogmatic assertion as is the comforting vision offered by the Christian interpreters, since the assertion in either case is based upon a selection of evidence as well as a selective interpretation of that evidence. It is difficult, when one considers the Joseph's coat of Lear interpretations, to dismiss the specter of the hermeneutical circle so prominent in Bultmann's exegetical theory:

All understanding, like all interpretation, is … continually oriented by the manner of posing the question and by what it aims at. … Consequently, it is never without presuppositions; that is to say, it is always directed by a prior understanding about which it interrogates the text. It is only on the basis of that prior understanding that it can, in general, interrogate and interpret.¹²

One need not follow Bultmann's speculation into the intellectual swamp of relativism to appreciate the usefulness of the caveat; if critical objectivity is at all possible, as E. D. Hirsch insists it is, one does not easily attain it.¹³ Interpretations of Shakespeare's plays are, and will continue to be, colored by personal predispositions since an active, personal response is inherent in the critical effort. But that this is the case is not to be regretted, for the great diversity of interpretations is our most eloquent witness to the wealth of Shakespeare's world as well as our best defence against critical dogmatism.

The final scene of King Lear provides the best opportunity to pursue these questions, for in the death of Cordelia lies the most formidable challenge to any affirmative, religious view of the tragic experience. The Christian critic's attempt to wrest comfort from the dire outcome of the play is decisively repudiated by the secular critic because the events of the play—its “facts”—supposedly contradict the central tenets of Christianity. But what specifically are these tenets? If we examine closely the secular arguments, we find (1) that nothing short of poetic justice would validate a religious argument; (2) that a truly Christian play would have to dramatize the miraculous intervention of the gods or otherwise catch them red-handed as they intrude into the affairs of men; and (3) that the universe in which the tragic ordeal takes place would have to be transparently meaningful. Nicholas Brooke, for example, states: “I have never been clear what constitutes a ‘Christian play.’ I should have supposed that label would involve some effort to justify God's ways to men, to make the mysterious less inscrutable” (p. 74). He later adds, “Poetical justice has been dealt out to Oswald, but embarrassingly, the gods didn't do it themselves,” just as it is Edgar—and not God—who provides the “miracle” that saves Gloucester (pp. 80, 78). Elton likewise attaches great importance to miracles as signs of God's benevolent Providence: “In an unprovidential universe, it is suggested, miracles are absent and prayers are generally [?] ineffective. Such mention of miracles dramatically recalls to the spectator their absence—a sharply contrasting beam of tenuous light in a grimly dark and God-forsaken world.”¹⁴ Finally, Rosenberg joins this chorus with his utter certitude about the vacancy of Lear's final vision: “On this ultimate stage of fools, no one—except possibly Lear dying in illusion—is so foolish as to see any evidence of divinity at work. … Death everywhere, of the good as well as the ‘bad’” (pp. 325-26).

Such responses cannot be peremptorily dismissed even by the Christian interpreter, for the question of poetic justice and of the benign concern of the gods for man is at the very heart of the play. From the outset of King Lear the characters express faith in the concern and loving-kindness of the gods: the gods, Lear feels, will at once take his part against his daughters; Cornwall's servants pray that the blinding of Gloucester be speedily avenged; Albany sees the killing of Cornwall as evidence that the “justicers” are above; and Edgar constantly assures his father that the gods are sensitive to human anguish:

                                                            … therefore, thou happy father,
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.(15)

(IV.vi.72-74)

What we notice, however, is a far less hospitable universe. As many commentators have pointed out, a conspicuous feature of the structure of King Lear is its irony, the rhythm of expectation and frustration to which the characters are subjected.¹⁶ It has been too infrequently noted, however, that the viewer is himself victimized by the same ironies. Our familiarity with the play—we all know how it ends—has largely blunted these ironies for us; like trained hounds we have been over the course before and are not likely to be led astray by false scents, as Lear, Albany, and Edgar are. But the “naive spectator,” the first-time viewer of the play, who lacks our synchronic, spatial sense of the play's form, would hardly be so fortunate—especially if he is familiar with the earlier Leir. The naive spectator, rather, is constantly being assured that all will be well; he is comforted by the discreet loyalty of Kent, by the early and persistent rumors of civil wars that will bring down the house divided of Goneril and Regan, by the tender care of Edgar (as Poor Tom) for his father, and especially by the perpetual promise of the return of Cordelia. What is especially noteworthy is how early the viewer is given these assurances: we hear of the “likely wars toward,” for example, in the first lines of Act II, while Kent offers us the promise of the “almost miracle” of Cordelia's return in Act II, scene ii—significantly before Lear's ordeal begins in earnest. It is as if the play is taking great pains to buffer the viewer from anguish, assuring him that the darkness is only temporary.

The peculiar cruelty of King Lear, of course, is that this promise is violated, most glaringly in the manner in which Cordelia—“Great thing of us forgot” (V.iii.238)—dies. Though we do see some measure of what could be taken for “rough justice” in the deaths of Cornwall, Oswald, Edmund, Goneril, and Regan, there is in the death of Cordelia no poetic justice, no “dark and vicious place” (V.iii.174) to account for her murder, no discernible incense thrown upon her sacrifice. The viewer is tempted, after this unconscionable mischief of the wanton gods, to accept as his the “cheerless, dark and deadly” world described by Kent (V.iii.292).

But does the play insist that we do so? Do the “facts” of the play, particularly its excruciating final scene, make King Lear absolutely incompatible with a Christian worldview? Any critic intending to offer an unequivocal reading of its ending should recall that he is witnessing a play that has throughout insisted upon the problematics of seeing and that this theme dominates the final lines of Lear:

Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips,
Look there, look there.

(V.iii.312-13)

Five times in his final fourteen words Lear refers to vision. As Rosenberg has aptly stated, King Lear dwells upon “the necessity and difficulty of seeing to know. … seeing and knowing are never certain in Lear, for the play's dialectic insists upon ambiguity” (p. 344). Thus Lear's final statement presents to the viewers the ultimate challenge to vision: everything depends upon what is actually seen—or not seen—in these final moments. But here is perhaps the most devastating irony of the play: we do not and cannot see what Lear sees. What we see is merely Lear seeing. Philip Hobsbaum is at least partially right in arguing that “we cannot, to put it crudely, know whether or not Lear dies smiling. At the end of the play we are in exactly the same position as the spectators on stage. … Most of the critics who have dealt with the play seem to me wrong in opting for one or the other of these possibilities [hope and despair]: the values are more complex than that.”¹⁷

Hobsbaum's comment is particularly useful when we consider the scene in the light of Betrand Evans' concept of discrepant awarenesses, for the concept may be especially relevant, though in a different way than most would imagine.¹⁸ For where comedy typically offers to the viewer a cognitive perspective superior to that of the central figure (we know, for example, that Cesario is really Viola), it is possible that in King Lear it is the central figure who has the privileged vision, with the viewer able to see only from afar. Such a conclusion would be supported by the logic of the play, which postulates suffering as a precondition to accurate vision:

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your pow'r quickly. …

(IV.i.67-69)

Thus Lear, because he has suffered, may indeed see more than the survivors (Edgar, Kent, and Albany), who seem to see nothing more than “general woe” (V.iii.321), and more than the spectators, whose suffering is at best vicarious. In short, if we accept what Rosenberg has said, that the play dwells upon “the necessity and difficulty of seeing to know,” then we must be careful about arrogating to ourselves a clarity of vision superior to that of Lear, for what he sees, or cannot see, must remain for us only a matter of inference.

In order to be convincing, a Christian reading of King Lear must bravely push on beyond the “redemption” scenes of Act IV and take in fully the devastatingly ironic death of Cordelia. It is true, as secular critics have argued, that the death of Cordelia suggests the failure of the gods to provide the “chance which does redeem all sorrows” (V.iii.268), the saving miracle that would attest to their beneficence. Their failure to do so is particularly agonizing because it has occurred in a universe that seemed to support a faith in poetic justice but which instead decisively reasserts its opaqueness; we are left blindly staring at that which passeth all understanding.

But for the Christian critic the opaqueness of the Lear world is no insurmountable obstacle, for the very structural ironies which purportedly impeach the Christian worldview provide, when seen from a different perspective, a strong support for a Christian reading. To begin with, if the absence of visible supernatural intervention is to be the cudgel to beat down Christian interpretations—or Christian interpreters—one had better take a second look at the traditional beliefs of Christianity, for it is not at all presumed in the mainstream of Christian orthodoxy that God will intervene on call for his faithful; nowhere is a God of sweetness and light promised to man on this earth. Saint Paul, for example, preaches constantly that God is beyond human knowing: “How incomprehensible are his judgments and how unsearchable his wayes” (Rom. 11:33).¹⁹ St. Augustine similarly speaks of God's “hidden equity that cannot be searched out by any human standard of measurement, though its effects are to be observed in human affairs and earthly arrangements.”²⁰ Moreover, in Shakespeare's own time Reformation theology, under the twin influences of St. Paul and St. Augustine, forcefully elaborated the concept of a “hidden God” whose power and purposes are not to be fathomed.²¹ In the words of Luther, God is “He for whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule or standard. … God is wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man's understanding.”²² It is true that commentators, especially in the Catholic tradition, insisted upon the rationality of God, but even these writers were careful to respect the mysterium tremendum; Richard Hooker, for example, was strongly influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas and was therefore eager to defend the “light of reason” against the fideistic and voluntaristic emphases of the Reformers, but he nevertheless writes:

The book of this law [the eternal law of God] we are not either able nor worthy to open and look into. That little thereof which we darkly apprehend we admire, the rest with religious ignorance we humbly and meekly adore.²³

The ordeal of Lear and the death of Cordelia are, to be sure, hard to cope with, but they do not contradict the image of God held in either Catholic or Protestant Christianity. In fact, an ear attuned to scripture would discern in Lear's ordeal resonances of the Book of Revelation:

I knowe thy workes, that thou art nether colde nor hote;

I wolde thou werest colde or hote. Therefore, because thou art lukewarm, and nether colde nor hote, it will come to passe, that I shall spewe thee out of my mouth.

For thou saist I am riche and increased with goods, and have neede of nothing, and knowest not how thou art wretched and miserable, and poore, and blinde, and naked.

(Rev. 3:15-17)

I think it is evident that the verses point to central themes of the play and suggest much about its imagery. The lesson that Lear learns in his suffering is that he has been morally callous; it is a lesson that he learns by becoming himself poor, naked, and—symbolically through his madness—blind. The suffering of Lear, seen against this background is at once punitive and propaedeutic, a necessary condition to his redemption:

I counsel thee to bie of me golde tryed by fire, that thou maiest be made riche, and white raiment, that thou maiest be clothed and that thy filthie nakednes do not appeare: and anoint thine eyes with salve, that thou maist se.

As manie as I love, I rebuke and chasten.

(Rev. 3:18-19)

Lear's “wheel of fire,” the garment in which he is clothed after his wanderings, and the regained sight which allows him to see the daughter he has rejected in his blindness assume a more specific significance in the light of this Scriptural passage. The suffering of Lear may be construed as the activity of a loving, albeit stern, God.

There still, of course, remains the death of Cordelia. It is true, as many critics have averred, that Christian interpretations generally ignore the final excruciating scene of the play: “This object poisons sight; / let it be hid” (Oth. V.ii.363-64). It is, however, equally true that secular interpreters tend to view the death of Cordelia as an isolated episode, apart from the rich context that the previous four acts of the play have provided.

Because this context has been effectively explored elsewhere, I shall limit myself to brief remarks about how it may support a Christian reading. First, what is especially remarkable about the final scene is its recapitulatory nature, its gathering up of themes which developed earlier in the play. It should be noted, for example, that the Lear whom we view in the final scene has come full circle, being in much the same position as he was in Act I: calling upon his one true daughter to utter the words needed to sustain value in his life and once again receiving as answer the silence which is the alpha and omega of the play:

What is't thou sayst? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

(V.iii.274-75)

But Cordelia's failure to speak now may be no more a denial of value than was her earlier silence, particularly when one construes that silence in the light of other themes and images. Above all, Lear's lament over the dead Cordelia, “And my poor fool is hanged” (V.iii.307), recalls the motif of folly which has been so prominent earlier in the play. We have seen folly constantly associated with virtue: in the Fool's poignant commitment to Lear despite his own worldly wisdom which counsels a different course; in the supererogatory loyalty of Kent, who serves Lear despite his unjust banishment; and particularly in the superfluity of Cordelia's loving forgiveness. Virtue, for all its foolishness, yet survives in an otherwise bleak world. The Christian reader will have little difficulty seeing in such instances of unlikely goodness reminiscences of the Pauline theme of Christian folly in the First Epistle to the Corinthians:

For brethren, you se your calling, how that not manie wise men after the flesh, not manie mighty, not manie noble, are called. But God hathe chosen the foolish things of the worlde to confounde the wise, and God hathe chosen the weake things of the worlde, to confounde the mighty things.

(1:26-27)²⁴

It is part of the Pauline scheme of things that true virtue be seen as folly or otherwise unpublished; Cordelia directs us to this view when she calls upon “All blest secrets, / All you unpublished virtues of the earth” (IV.iv.15-16) to remedy her father's distress.²⁵ For a prominent feature of King Lear is that virtue, in a world overwhelmed by evil, chooses to or is compelled to conceal its presence, to operate covertly. The list of “unpublished virtues” in the play is impressive; it includes Kent and Edgar, who fulfill their obligations in disguise; Gloucester, who summons up unexpected moral strength to assist his king and to bear his own ordeal patiently; the servants of Cornwall, who unexpectedly lash out at the cruelty of their master; and finally, Cordelia, who can publish her love for her father neither at the beginning nor at the end of the play.

But does the list of unpublished virtues end there? No one, I think, will deny that the question Lear addresses to the dead Cordelia, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” (308-09), is really addressed to the gods who would allow such an abomination. The Christian interpreter, recognizing that Lear has been throughout his ordeal surrounded by goodness which he has had difficulty perceiving, may have warrant enough to see the dead Cordelia as but a further instance of a pattern which points beyond to the gods, the ultimate unpublished virtues of the world. The apparent absence of redeeming goodness has thus far proven to be no guarantee that it does not exist.

And thus a play which begins with a king announcing “darker purposes” which lead to the temporary loss of a daughter ends with a Higher Power (or powers) announcing infinitely darker purposes and apparently bringing the same victim to distress. The Christian viewer will accept the harsh fact that the world offers no cheap consolations but need not necessarily infer that God has forsaken that world.

Rather, the Christian reader who is responsive to the Biblical echoes of the play may view the play as an attempt to demythologize Christianity, to reassert the hiddenness of God against the presumptuous pieties and shallow rationalism of the Edgars and Albanys of the world. In the death of Cordelia the viewers are once more confronted with the Judaeo-Christian God who, from the Book of Job on, has chosen to remain hidden and refuses to render account of His “darker purposes” to man. As Ivor Morris has indicated, King Lear is preeminently a play of stripping—of clothing, of language, of social masks—in order to unveil what is most fundamentally real (p. 184); in Act V it is God himself who is stripped, divested of the conventional images man has created for him. The God who emerges in the final events of the play is not the majuscule God as prime mover and creator of all, nor God as supreme justicer, nor even the God of translucent love to whom Cordelia seems to point. He is rather an unaccommodated and unaccommodating God who refuses masks of any kind, who denies us either the explanations we seek or the miracles which would make such explanations unnecessary. He is the miniscule God of Pauline theology who denies both signs and wisdom:

For seing the worlde by wisdome knewe not God in the wisdome of God, it pleased God by the foolisheness of preaching to save them that beleve:

Seing also that the Jewes require a signe, and the Grecians seke after wisdome.

But we preache Christ crucified: unto the Jewes a stumbling block, and unto the Grecians foolishnes.

(1 Cor. 1:21-23)

For the Christian interpreter the death of Cordelia need not, cannot be explained away; as “stumbling block” it supports rather than contradicts Revelation, the true Biblical God, even and perhaps especially that of the New Testament, being a God of faith seen but through a glass darkly, whose promises are beheld from afar. The ending of King Lear, in short, presents a demythologized Christianity that offers mystery rather than justice and that is founded upon hope rather than fulfillment; once more the language of Paul offers the best commentary:

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is sene, is not hope: for how can a man hope for that which he seeth?

But if we hope for that we se not, we do with patience abide for it.

(Rom. 8:24-25)

Such a Christian reading, again, is not intended as the authoritative reading of King Lear; it is offered, rather, in an attempt to show that a Christian response to the play may be in conformity with both the “facts” of the play and with the doctrines of Christianity. Such a response, however, does not invalidate the secular reading, since even the most adamantly Christian of interpreters must feel the force of Edgar's admonition to “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (V.iii.326). What King Lear strongly suggests is that the lion of tragedy need not be devoured by the lamb of theology, for as Paul Ricoeur has suggested, tragedy survives the most ardent hermeneutical efforts of Christian thinkers:

Killed twice, by the philosophical Logos and by the Judaeo-Christian Kerygma, [tragedy] survived its double death. The theme of the wrath of God, the ultimate motive of tragic consciousness, is invincible to the arguments of the philosopher as well as of the theologian. … As soon as meaninglessness appears to swoop down intentionally on man, the schema of the wrath of God looms up and tragic consciousness is restored.

(p. 326)

To assert that King Lear admits both secular and religious interpretations is not, however, to argue for critical relativism, to consider the play as a tabula rasa awaiting any critical impression whatever. We must, as Murray Krieger has stated, “accept the hermeneutical gap that separates every critique from the work,” but we must do so without denying the intersubjective nature of poetic communication; “at some level,” says Krieger, “in spite of persuasive epistemological skepticism, all of us share Dr. Johnson's hard-headed, rock-kicking impatience with the unbridgeable private worlds of solipsism.”²⁶ It is evident that the play, despite its apparent multivalence, creates its unique frame of discourse, channeling inquiry into specific areas of speculation and compelling attention to clearly-defined overwhelming questions. Thus a Christian interpreter can agree with much that Brooke, Elton, Rosenberg, and Stampfer have observed about the play: King Lear indeed dramatizes man's quest for justice; the folly, callousness, and brutality of which humanity is capable; the apparent injustice which man may suffer. It also dramatizes the unlikely perdurance of virtue under the most trying of conditions, as well as the moral awakening of several under the pressure of adversity. Calculations about what all of this adds up to may differ, and differ markedly, but it is most probably true that any interpretation of the play which denies that these are central concerns is simply wrong.

The open form of tragedy, its respect for the limits of human experience, allows readers to draw different conclusions: enough is given to allow interpreters to “see feelingly,” to infer an interpretation based upon their own personal experience of the play; but enough is withheld to compel respect for the tragic mystery, to remind us that our conclusions are, after all, nothing but inference. If we learn anything from King Lear, it is that we all must see in our way, that a personal response is mandated by the tragic structure, but that our own vision is necessarily limited. Perhaps this humbling truth, hermeneutical as well as theological in its implications, is the play's most valuable revelation.

Notes

1. Nicholas Brooke, “The Ending of King Lear,” in Shakespeare 1564-1964, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Providence, R. I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1964), p. 77.

2. “A. C. Bradley, Shakespeare, and the Infinite,” Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975), 98.

3. Perhaps the most useful survey of this problem is in E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976).

4. Cf. M. H. Abrams, “What is the Use of Theorizing About the Arts?” In Search of Literary Theory, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 31-35.

5. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York: Pantheon, 1960); see esp. ch. 9, “The Analysis of Vision in Art.”

6. Robert Hapgood's “Shakespeare and the Included Spectator,” Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969) is, of course, the seminal article.

7. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 12.

8. Ibid., pp. 10-11; for a similar view, see Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 35-36, 86-87.

9. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 24-25.

10. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. 326.

11. Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1965), p. 115.

12. Cited in Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper, 1967), p. 351.

13. See especially Hirsch's “Appendix I. Objective Interpretation,” in Validity in Interpretation, pp. 209-44; the essay first appeared in PMLA, 75 (1960).

14. W. R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1966), p. 236.

15. All references to the plays are to The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt, 1972).

16. See, e. g., Elton's “Irony as Structure,” pp. 329-34.

17. Philip Hobsbaum, Theory of Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), p. 161.

18. See Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), esp. p. viii.

19. All Biblical references are to the Geneva Bible (1560), facsimile ed. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

20. Cited in Morris, p. 147.

21. See Paul R. Sellin, “The Hidden God: Reformation Awe in Renaissance English Literature,” in The Darker Vision of the Renaissance, ed. Robert Kinsman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 175.

22. Cited in Morris, p. 147.

23. Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, (New York: Everyman's Library, 1925), I, 153.

24. For a fuller treatment of the relevance of the Corinthian letters, see Roger Cox, Between Heaven and Earth (New York: Holt, 1969).

25. I have discussed the theme of “unpublished virtues” at greater length in “Shakespearean Tragedy and the Problem of Transcendence,” Shakespeare Studies, 7 (1974), 307-25.

26. Murray Krieger, “The Critic as Person and Persona,” in The Personality of the Critic, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 87-88.