Spies of God: King Lear and the Christian Mystics 1

Linda L. Jacobs

Back to the Intégrité Journal 

In the second part of his Four Quartets (1943), T. S. Eliot writes, “Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly” (125). Doubtless, such foolishness applies to old women as well. Perhaps my own late middle-aged folly tempts me to once more “burn through” old man King Lear’s “fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay… [to] once more humbly assay / The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit” (Keats). My hesitancy to do so arises from recognizing that Lear, as Kenneth J. E. Graham recently wrote in the journal Modern Philology, stands for Literature with a capital L, so that “what we write about it stands for Criticism” with a capital C. The hugeness of Lear does tend to magnify the weight of anything we can say about it. Even so sophisticated a critic as Northrop Frye expresses awe in the face of such a masterpiece. 2

Yet, some of the most violent philosophical arguments I have had with teachers, friends, and colleagues over the years have centered on conflicting interpretations of this tragic play. During my Duke undergraduate days, expressing my opinion about King Lear engendered a disturbing chastisement from Professor Helen Bevington. “What do you mean, a ‘vision of transcendence’?” she all but shrieked at me. “This play has no hope, no justice, no redemption. Cordelia’s dead, Gloucester’s dead, Lear’s Fool is dead; nothing will save them.”

“But he dies believing her alive,” I timidly responded.

“That’s because he’s crazy, insane—a nutty old man howling at the universe! It’s all absolutely meaningless!” Mrs. Bevington concluded, glaring at me, basilisk-like, through coke-bottle lenses.

And, indeed, despite a decades-old tradition that Christianizes this play about a pre-Christian Celtic king of Britain, twentieth-century materialists and current postmodernists have all but derisively discarded attempts to view it in a religious context. As Rene Fortin puts it, “Attempts to redeem King Lear by appealing to intimation of Christian transcendence have been summarily, if not vehemently, dismissed by secular critics” (113). Not even critics of such stature as A. C. Bradley, G. Wilson Knight, Reuben Arthur Brower, J. A. Bryant, Robert H. West, Roy W. Battenhouse, and Northrop Frye receive much respect from postmodernists on this subject. 3

The pessimistic view of Shakespeare’s tragic play has gathered momentum ever since Jan Kott envisioned “King Lear as Endgame” (1964). In King Lear and the Gods (1966), William R. Elton asserted that the Christians are simply wrong about the play because, in “seeking to escape the dire significance of the tragic vision, they are, in effect, guilty of wishful thinking.” Elton found “the Christian optimist interpretation” invalid for two reasons: no evidence exists of Lear’s salvation, and nothing in the play supports the idea of benevolent Providence (286). Most recent critics think that Shakespeare’s play leads only “to the edge of religious insight” (Danby 299) or opt for terms such as “ambiguity” (N. Joseph Calarco and William Empson ), “paradox” (Albert Cook and Helen Gardner, ), “contrariety” (Norman Rabkin and Robert Grudin, ), and “complementarity” (Derek Traversi). 4

Nevertheless, personal predilection and cultural moment—America’s own national “dark night of the soul” after 9/11—compel me to cast caution to the winds and defend mystical experience from detractors who equate the soul’s dark journey with some kind of naïve idealism. Throughout its rending confrontation with pain and folly, the action of King Lear echoes the recorded experiences of mystics at the highest level of spiritual development. Passages from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets offer a convenient frame on which to hang the steps of the journey. Those passages reflect Eliot’s thorough knowledge of medieval and Renaissance Christian mystics, both British and European, such as Julian of Norwich and St. John of the Cross. 5

The journey usually begins with awareness of discomfort with old structures and proceeds through several stages: setting out on a lonely quest or dark journey that alienates one from all other companions; entering a desert, wilderness, pit, waste land, or ash heap; enduring fire, flood, storms, or roaring lions; coming to a place of nothingness, hopelessness, helplessness, of utter humility and submission; losing all reason and knowledge; and finally falling into a symbolic sleep or seeming death-like trance that represents the relinquishment of the ego. To borrow Eliot’s words, we might call them the six d’s: dis-ease/disaffection, descent, darkness, deluge, destitution, and death. The seventh stage may well be delight of the soul in God, but no mystic would claim assurance of that while living in a fallen world. True, some of the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews walked through fire and water or had their dead restored to them, but many others were exiled, cold and hungry, tortured, sawn asunder. Thus, Cordelia’s hanging and King Lear’s devastating final scene do not disqualify the play as Christian. Although Jews and Christians refuse to accept their own faith’s prophecies that the world will become increasingly worse, few intellectual Christians who have experienced the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, or 9/11 could hold optimistic expectations about either this planet or their own lives upon it.

In her critically acclaimed work Mysticism: Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911; republished 1990), the English poet and mystic Evelyn Underhill describes the initial impetus for spiritual development as psychic fatigue and “dis-ease” (382). In “Burnt Norton,” the first part of Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot puts it this way: “Here is a place of disaffection…. Eructation of unhealthy souls” (120). The dis-ease in King Lear involves seeing with (not through) the eyes. The Earl of Gloucester voices the supreme irony of the play when he declares, “Come, if it be nothing, I shall not ‘need spectacles’” (I.ii.35). He, Lear, and many other characters at first lack spiritual vision and desperately need “spectacles” of compassion and selflessness. A kind of inner blindness disables most of the principal characters in King Lear. They pursue what is correct, what is reasonable, or what is clever; they display immense concern about proper rewards and punishments. At first, nearly all fail to recognize the unpredictable, irrational quality of the human spirit. Lear and others attempt to buy and sell love; a man’s dignity is bargained over and counted out. Revenge obsesses the minds of some—they wish to give their antagonists what they deserve. Humility and mercy seldom temper their reactions. No one but Cordelia can accept love freely given without remuneration or cause—unless it is finally forced upon him.

At the beginning of the play, Lear asks: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most, / That we our largest bounty may extend / Where nature doth with merit challenge” (I.i.51-53). He believes that love is some sort of salable commodity, either paid for or won by deeds and gifts. This petty attitude is also evidenced by his references to Cordelia’s suitors. He proclaims them rivals for her love, when actually all but France are rivals for her dowry. Lear’s exacting standard requires gratitude as the natural return for everything he has done for his children. Other instances indicate his inflexibility. For example, when the disguised Kent supports him out of friendly devotion, Lear insists on giving him money. “Now, my friendly knave, I thank thee. There’s earnest of thy service,” he explains condescendingly (I.iv.88).

Lear is not the only character troubled by this flaw. When Edmund offers his services, Kent replies in terms of duty: “Then I must love you” (I.i.29). Kent’s defense of Cordelia likewise appeals to merit: he lauds her for honesty and morality. He expresses his gratitude to Gloucester with “The gods reward your kindness” (III.vi.5; italics mine). Regan restates this prevalent attitude more boldly. She openly describes her counterfeit affection for Lear in monetary terms: “I am made of that self mettle as my sister.” Here she declares with a probable pun on “mettle” and “metal.” “And prize me at her worth,” she continues, adding that Goneril yet “comes too short” in her regard (I.i.69-70, 72). Every phrase relates to coinage or trade. Later, the daughters callously measure their father’s need for respect in numbers of servants and the luxury and price of his accommodations. Edmund declares himself bound to the goddess Nature—antipodal to human and heaven-ordained law—and demands in recompense her aid with his illegal, illegitimate projects. Regarding the Duke of Burgundy, Cordelia says that “respects of fortune are his love” (I.i.248).

Indeed, only a few characters display any real insight. The King of France says, “Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from th’ entire point” (I.i.238-40). He recognizes that Cordelia is “most rich being poor,” for she has no payment to give for love but herself, and, therefore, must accept it freely (I.i.250). Though Cordelia has little according to the world’s materialistic standards, she represents intangible values that have worth beyond price.

Lear does not understand intangibles; they are meaningless to him. He declares, “Nothing will come of nothing” (I.i.90), which implies that no reward will be given without service and that no love can exist without gratitude. It also belies the orthodox doctrine of creation ex nihilo, or creation from nothing. Lear clutches the idea of merit tenaciously because it contains the essence of his stern retributional creed. Yet his words may well reveal a secret anxiety: the mighty ruler may fear that he has never done anything of worth to deserve affection and respect as a man and a father. Even his desire to give up his kingdom illustrates his need to prove his worth. He cannot accept that his generosity could possibly be rewarded with nothing—that bad outcomes happen to good people. When the fool gives him advice on temperate living, Lear repeats a second time, “Why, no, boy. Nothing can be made out of nothing” (I.iv.126). Not abstractions but concrete objects and physical deeds hold significance for him. Even the least noble speeches of the least important characters echo and reiterate such a philosophy. Much discussion concerns the bribing of servants, buying of allegiance, and paying whores for sex. Lear demands loyalty and gratitude as though they were palpable things. Without material possessions—money, land, position—a human being is considered worthless.

Except for Cordelia, none—least of all Lear—can forgive. Lear demands justice; his anger and pain clamor for revenge. Thus, he is unbending when Cordelia disappoints him. “Peace, Kent! / Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” he storms as he disinherits her (I.i.121-22). Then, he sends Kent away for merely questioning his actions. For her misuse of him, Lear curses Goneril with sterility and a life of trouble. Upon Regan he invokes lameness. Inflamed against his son, Gloucester cries, “The wingèd vengeance overtake such children” (III.vii.66). Believing that Gloucester has plotted against him, Cornwall boasts, “I will have my revenge ere I depart his house” (III.v.1). All the hatred festers and intensifies until the audience wonders with Lear, “Is man no more than this?” It seems to the watcher that “humanity must perforce prey upon itself / As monsters of the deep,” and the spectator can scarce but applaud when Lear calls down the judgment of the gods upon a wicked earth:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow.
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man. (III.ii.1-9).

In order to move beyond this polarized state of disaffection, the spiritual acolyte must descend lower; in order to heal the dis-ease, our sickness must grow worse. Indeed, it must become what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls sickness unto death. The English and continental mystics available to Shakespeare in the sixteenth century typically differentiate between the visions and imagination of their earliest illuminations and the onset of another “final stage,” which often begins in what appears to be disintegration and disharmony between the self and the world. Their health often suffers, and their friends forsake them.

In King Lear, Gloucester seeks to blame his suffering on the stars:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us…. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father…. [T]he King falls from bias of nature…. [A]ll ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (I.ii.101-12)

Gloucester ’s account of conditions in ancient Britain sounds mightily contemporary for Shakespeare’s time as well as our own. He laments that Kent has been banished for goodness and honesty. And Lear leaves his daughter Regan’s house by night, in “to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain” (III.i.11).

Lear’s experience on the heath reflects the imagery described by religious writers in all generations. In his The Idea of the Holy (1931), Rudolph Otto says that the experience of the dark night is represented in two ways: first, by darkness, silence, and empty distance—the kenoma or emptiness of the mystic journey; and second, by tumult and suffering (12-18). Both visions obviously appear in the blasted heath, the storm, and tempest of Shakespeare’s play. “Here’s a night pities / neither wise men nor fools,” comments Lear’s fool as they set out with nothing on the dark heath (III.ii.12-13).

Lear tears off his kingly robes and dresses himself, like Edgar, in the rags and weeds of a mad beggar, crying, “[U]naccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!” (III.iv.101-03). He has already voluntarily given up his kingdom, and been divested by force of his retinue of soldiers. Out on the heath, he confronts both his guilt and his helplessness: “Tremble thou wretch, / That has within thee undivulgèd crimes” (III.ii.51-52). With these words, Lear denounces the evil done by others, but of himself he claims, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (III.ii.59-60). His inability to accept his own guilt forms one major tension of the play. Without repentance, he cannot be redeemed, and he will not repent unless he recognizes his faults.

Lear begins to learn about hurt and weakness when his daughters strip him of his retinue. But he must reach beyond himself—assent to his relationship with mankind. As he himself explains, people told me he was everything. When he remarks to Gloucester that his hand smells of mortality, he admits his physicality and humanity. He tells his blinded, equally fragile, old friend that he is not “ague-proof” (IV.vi.103-04). That is, a king remains as vulnerable to chance and fate as any ordinary citizen.

But the dark night ultimately brings extraordinary sensitivity to faults and sins, sometimes “to the point of morbidity” (Underhill 415). As the play unfolds, Lear gradually realizes that he has made many grave mistakes. In the middle of a conversation, he rasps suddenly, half to himself, that he did Cordelia wrong. That single comment indicates just how wild and constant the tempest in his mind is. In the howling storm, watching other homeless people attempt to gather firewood, Lear discovers some of his own failings as king. “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; / Exposed thyself to feel what wretches feel,” he exclaims (III.iv.32-34). Lear’s eyes are opened at last to human suffering, to the depth and complexity of human emotion.

Experience changes Lear’s stern view of justice: “None does offend, none—I say none!” he cries and means that offenses, including his own, are immeasurable (IV.vi.165). Though necessary, acknowledgment of his errors is both difficult and destructive for so proud a man. Lear fights tears and shuns verbal admission. His inward burning shame, however, torments him into madness. It seems for a time that Lear has been right—that he must receive exact retribution for his deeds. Take your own medicine, king, Lear tells himself. He cast off one daughter, and the other daughters cast him off. He failed to see that the poor and hungry were cared for, and now he must experience the same misery. He defied “nature,” loving fatherhood, and nothing solid or natural remains: sin has made earth turbulent; guilt has agitated individuals and nations. People can no longer communicate coherently, for they are false and superficial. They have no words to express emotions, no form, and no order.

But Lear must be taught to discern the elusive quality of nothing. He has to learn that real love cannot be bought and that it can exist devoid of any worldly reason. According to Lear’s requital scheme, Cordelia should hate him. She has good cause. By her reply, “No cause, no cause” (IV.vii.76), however, she wipes out the barrier between them and forgives him completely of her own free will. As many have pointed out, Shakespeare relates this magnanimous pardon to Christian salvation by consequence and allusion.

The storm that echoes and intensifies Lear’s insanity, for example, Shakespeare describes using Judeo-Christian symbolic motifs. Both “tempests” suggest chaos, the theoretical formlessness and confusion before God’s ordered creation. Pouring rain recalls the Great Flood and the ancient threat of a “Great Deluge” that would destroy the earth. Albany even introduces the image of Leviathan, the sea-monster—a truth that applies in the play both to factionalism in society and to the aberrations in individual minds. Loss of language, too, reminds us of the confounding of tongues at the Tower of Babel. When Lear enters dressed in weeds, he wears the outward signs of his inner discord, weeds being a biblical symbol of rebellion and worthlessness. 6 The desolate heath resembles the abyss, while Lear’s own guilt and the elements provide his torture.

Cordelia becomes a Christ-like redeemer for Lear. Paraphrasing the words of Jesus, she whispers to him, “O dear father, / It is thy business I go about” (IV.iv.23-24). Cordelia returns only good for evil, gives something for nothing. She and the doctor array Lear in white robes. When Lear sleeps in white garments, he appears dead. The weary man awakes to a heaven of redemption and reconciliation, but he cannot accept it at first. “Thou art a soul in bliss,” he says to Cordelia, “but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead” (IV.vii.46-48). When he finally comprehends fully, Lear cries out to Cordelia in an attitude of worshipful prayer, “You must bear with me. / Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish” (IV.84-85).

The death of Cordelia herself displays deliberate parallels with the Crucifixion of Christ, noticed by many, perhaps most convincingly by G. Wilson Knight (The Shakespearean Tempest 303). Not only is she hanged, but Lear mutters, “I am old now, / And these same crosses spoil me” (V.iii.278-79), as he carries her body in a pieta-like tableau of the Lamentation. When he first realizes that she is dead, he sobs: “And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life? / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never” (V.iii.306-09). But King Lear’s glorious paradox echoes that of the New Testament: Lear discovers Cordelia’s living spirit at the moment of her death, so he dies believing her alive. “Do you see this? Look her lips / Look there, look there—,” he gasps (V.iii.311-12). Lear also says, “This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so, / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt” (V.iii.266-68; italics mine). Not only does Cordelia embody St. John of the Cross’s anima, or little soul depicted as the feminine Bride of Christ by alchemists and mystics, but also Lear’s words convey the quality of insight beyond the grave.

We do not have to rewrite King Lear à la Nahum Tate in order to call it Christian. The play draws us with it through perhaps the most intense vision of loss ever put on the stage. Lear’s death reminds us that the ultimate union with God will “cost us not less than everything.” All we can say is, “Give me an old man’s frenzy”—let me seek spiritual truth with King Lear. 7 Overwhelmed and arrested by the conspirators, he speaks submissively but with a kind of transcendent freedom:

Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage….
So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon….
Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. (V.i.8-21; italics mine)

If the maturing Shakespeare rejected court power, espionage, and political intrigue to turn toward the realm of the spirit, this passage makes a powerful statement of that change. 8 King Lear the character may never come to that place T. S. Eliot alludes to—the place in which the fire of worldly suffering becomes comprehended by Dante’s multifoliate rose of Paradise. But if Lear never gets that far, I believe his creator did and displayed his transformation in King Henry VIII and the final comedies of forgiveness. King Lear marks the pivotal point toward that final transcendent vision.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the National Faculty Leadership Conference, Washington, D.C., June 24-27 , 2004 .

2 The poetic reference is to John Keats’s sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” composed in 1818 and first published in 1838. Kenneth J. E. Graham reviewed Judy Kronenfeld’s King Lear and the Naked Truth in Modern Philology 99 (August 2001): 99. The Frye reference comes from The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton UP, 1957), 194.

3 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: L ectures onHamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1905); G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (1932); Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (1951); J. A. Bryant, Hippolyta’s View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare’s Plays (1961); Robert H. West, Shakespeare & the Outer Mystery (1968); Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and its ChristianPremises (1969); and Robert Sandler, ed., Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986). Their books are older and so well-known that I do not think they need further reference. All include at least some suggestion that the play has a spiritual dimension.

4 Calarco, Empson, Cook, Gardner, Rabkin, Grudin, Traversi—all developed these ideas at length in major books about tragedy.

5 Naming these two raises all sorts of issues that would suggest the need for a larger study on this subject. Such issues include the question of Catholic as opposed to Protestant documents, the role of alchemical emblematic texts (see Frances Yates), the prevailing social attitudes toward all these, and their degree of availability to Shakespeare. Nonetheless, the powerful influence of the Reformation scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam upon the British Renaissance through his friendship with Sir Thomas More suggests the likelihood of interest in and knowledge about such material. Shakespeare frequently quotes or alludes to Erasmus, and the playwright clearly had read some of More’s historical documents. Most readers knew at least some of the Church Fathers through Christian Humanist traditions in education, while mystical documents like those of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing “ran across England at deere rates” (Underhill 466, quoting from an old English broadside).

6 Northrop Frye examines this kind of biblical image in his book The Great Code, which deals with the influence of the King James edition on English literature.

7 The poetic quotations come from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” and William Butler Yeats’s “Acre of Grass.”

8 My theory, though not provable without deeper investigations in Italy and Spain, posits Shakespeare’s involvement with political intrigue similar to that which enveloped playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962.

Elton, William R. King Lear and the Gods. San Marino, CA: Huntington, 1966.

Fortin, Rene E. “Hermeneutical Circularity and Christian Interpretations of King Lear.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 113-25.

Keats, John. “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” 2003. 17 Dec. 2004. <http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1134.html>

Kirkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Ed. Trans. Walter Lowrie. 1941. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.

Knight, G. Wilson. The Shakespearean Tempest. 1932. London: Methuen, 1953.

Kott, Jan. “King Lear as Endgame.” Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.

Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational . Trans. John W. Harvey. London: Oxford UP, 1931.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Viking, 1969. 1060-1106.

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness . 1911. New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1990.

Yates , Frances . The Last Plays: A New Approach. London: Routledge, 1975.

LINDA L. JACOBS <ljacobs@fmarion.edu> is Professor of English at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina.  She received a B.A. in English from Duke University, a one-year Rotary Foundation Fellowship to Liverpool University, and completed the M.A. and Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at the University of Kentucky.  She taught full-time at Warner Southern College in Florida, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of New Orleans before coming to Francis Marion. Her specialties include Shakespeare and his classical origins.

© 2005 Missouri Baptist University. All rights reserved.