Not many springs ago, I read King Lear in a Shakespeare class at Grove City College. The question that my professor posed at the beginning of our study of the play—and when the time came for final discussion—was, essentially, this: “Can there be a Christian tragedy?” In other words, can a work of literature end in sorrow and death while portraying Christian truth and hope?
During our class discussions, I was unsure of the answer to my professor’s question. But as I have re-read Lear in this Lenten season, I have grown in greater appreciation of the question itself, for considering the possibility of Christian tragedy directs one to consider the tragicomedy of the Christian story.
At the outset of Shakespeare’s play, King Lear divides his kingdom between his three daughters, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia, based upon their professions of love to him. While Regan and Goneril deceive their father with flattery, Cordelia, who truly loves her father, refuses to fall prey to her father’s test, instead remaining silent to her own detriment and banishment. The play follows Regan and Goneril’s plotting against their father, his descent into madness, and the slow self-destruction of Lear’s family and country.
Meanwhile, the play also follows the family of the Earl of Gloucester, who is eventually blinded for his devotion to the king. Gloucester’s bastard son Edmund plots against his faithful brother Edgar, deceiving his father into believing that Edgar is plotting his murder. Edmund joins forces with Regan, Goneril, and their husbands, while Edgar, cast out and subsequently disguised as a mad beggar, saves his father from suicide, the Earl of Kent, also banished, serves King Lear in disguise, and Cordelia is briefly restored to her father. Nonetheless the conflict between Edmund and his forces and Lear and Cordelia’s forces results in manifold deaths, including that of the faultless Cordelia and, from grief, Lear.
In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even into the nineteenth century, King Lear was performed with a happy ending, bestowed upon the play by Nathum Tate’s 1681 “improved” version The History of King Lear. Tate keeps Cordelia alive and marries her to Edgar, who gives the revised play its moral: regardless of the “storms of fortune” that may come, “Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.”
In Lear, truth and virtue do succeed—but only with great and irreversible loss. Restoration, or, as Wendell Berry puts it, “the separation and rejoining of parents and children,” is a major theme of the play, and Shakespeare gives us a fleeting restoration in Lear. Edgar, disguised as a mad beggar, saves his crazed, blinded father from suicide: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again,” he famously says in urging his father to turn from despair. Cordelia and Lear are joyously reconciled despite Lear’s growing madness. The evil sisters die due to their own passions, and even Edmund, after losing in battle to Edgar, is repentant before his death. But the storm of evil has thundered too far for such restoration to succeed without great cost: Cordelia is hanged in prison before the repentant Edmund’s reversal can reach her, and Lear, like the Earl Gloucester, dies from grief.
The play’s tragedy is heightened by its momentary hopefulness, its paradoxically comic elements: this is no Macbeth, where those who die are the plotting, power-hungry ones, and the audience is left with a sense of poetic justice. Rather, in Lear, good and evil alike die, even after the restoration of father to son and father to daughter. And thus the audience is left with a sense not of poetic justice but of the crazed brokenness of the world.
One might perhaps read Lear as a nihilist play, as many twentieth century critics have done. Madness and absurdity thread throughout the play, and Lear’s statement that “nothing will come of nothing” likewise echoes throughout the play. The play’s panoply of death seems to support this reading.
But of course nihilism was not in vogue in Shakespeare’s day. Much like the twentieth-century post-colonial reading of The Tempest, a nihilist reading of Lear transposes modern ideas of meaninglessness onto Shakespeare’s tragedy. Shakespeare, a Christian writing in a Christian time, knew that the universe was not ultimately meaningless, and the keen sorrow of the ending supports this: if the play did indeed propose a nihilist worldview, Edgar would not encourage his fellow characters to honor “the weight of this sad time,” and Shakespeare’s audience would not feel such weight.
In other words, a nihilist play would not end in such heart-rending sorrow. As critic Anthony Nuttall writes, “An ethically nihilist play would leave one thinking that good and evil have no meaning. King Lear lives us with a sharpened sense of the difference between good and evil, and, lying behind that, of the difference between goodness and nothingness.”
Lear presents a vision of the brokenness of this life and the tragic beauty of the self-giving, cruciform love of characters such as Cordelia and Edgar. Such tragedy—wherein a noble humbles himself to save another and an innocent peacemaker dies—does in fact bear witness to the Christian story, as the season of Lent and its culmination in Holy Week particularly reminds us.
The tragedy of Lear is the tragedy of life in a cursed world. It is the tragedy of the barren womb, the buried child, the broken marriage. It is the tragedy of the missing loved one, the fallen soldier, the martyr. It is the tragedy of the war camp and the school shooting and the abortion clinic. It is the tragedy of Good Friday, wherein a righteous man—even the perfect Son of God—was killed, seemingly without cause: “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief… He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.”
Lear reminds us of the truth we know too well: in this sin-sick world, sorrow and death befall even the blameless.
But we also learn from the play that there is a worse fate than to suffer and die without cause—that is, the plight of Regan and Goneril, a death merited by one’s own wickedness, a death in sin. The subplot of Edgar and his father shows us that it is far nobler that Gloucester should die naturally, “twist two extremes of passion, joy and grief,” than that he should die at his own hands. Shakespeare shows us that it is better to, as Wendell Berry observed of the play, die “within the proper bounds of the human estate” than to “pass beyond the possibility of change or redemption.” Lear hints thus at the sweetness of goodness: it is the redemptive wisdom of Edgar that lends Lear its depth; it is the purity and mercy of Cordelia that gives the play its height and beauty. Only because of such hope and virtue can the tragedy be termed a “Christian” tragedy.
But these bright points of the play can only dimly reflect the ultimate comedy of Christianity: Lear gives us part of the story, the part which is, as in the popular phrase, “on this side of heaven.” There is yet that reality on the other side of heaven, the reality we celebrate at Lent’s culmination in Easter.
It is the Resurrection of Christ that tells us that the death of the blameless is not, at last, senseless. The Resurrection banishes nihilism to the outer darkness. In Christ’s triumph over death we may ask with Paul, “O Death, where is thy sting?”
Berry writes a parable of “The Man in the Well” in his novel Jayber Crow. In Berry’s parable, a man falls into a deep well in the woods, and, being alone, despairs. Berry does not give the story a definite ending; instead, he writes:
Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.” Have mercy.
Faith is the knowledge that tragedy is temporary, that while “Truth and Virtue” may not “at last succeed” on this earth, they will beyond this earth.
In the meantime, the man of faith’s knowledge leads him to the kinds of action that Shakespeare’s Edgar and Kent display. Berry points to the Christological echoes in Kent’s statements as he undertakes to serve Lear in disguise:
…Now banished Kent, If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemned, So may it come thy master, whom thou lov’st, Shall find thee full of labors.
Such men of faith as Edgar and Kent take upon themselves the guise of fools and servants to save those they love, hoping for a seemingly impossible redemption. The man of faith knows that even the deepest darkness may be irradiated—hence Berry’s allusions in the parable of the Man in the Well to Psalm 139, which reads:
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
The man of faith’s knowledge is grounded in these truths, that dark and light are alike to God, whose own son Jesus Christ descended into hell and into the uttermost darkness to save the lost, and passed through such darkness, rising victorious on Easter morning.
Image Via: Wikimedia Commons
