Last week, I presented the paper “Thou swear’st thy gods in vain”: Supernatural Language in King Lear at the 2015 Southeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature. Here it is.
“Thou swear’st thy gods in vain”: Supernatural Language in King Lear
I take the title of my paper from the retort Kent makes to Lear early in Act 1 Scene 1. Kent has just given us the play’s dominant metaphor for insight when he instructs Lear to “see better” (1.1.158).[1] Lear thanks Kent for his advice by promptly invoking Apollo, the god of the sun. The irony is palpable. Lear calls on the god who gives human beings light while showing how in the dark he is. Kent cuts off Lear and in a nice bit of rhetorical judo redirects Lear’s curse: “Now by Apollo king, thou swear’st thy gods in vain” (1.1.159-61). The phrase acts as a nice interpretive litmus test for the play’s critics. Is Kent saying that Lear’s particular method of, or motivation for, swearing by the gods is in vain? Or does Kent’s warning hint that Lear’s true vanity as a human is even attempting to summon the gods?
I must admit that as I’ve read for, thought and talked about, and written this paper, Kent’s words have haunted me. The last thing I would want to do at a conference on Christianity and Literature is swear by the Christian God in vain: either by denying the presence of authentic Christian grace in the play or by mistakenly attributing some punishment or intervention in the play to God’s providence when it’s the work of people. I could play the Cordelia to my fellow interpreters’ Goneril and Regan—the modest critic who decides to love and be silent. But perhaps Kent’s early statement to Lear should be my motto: “My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thy enemies nor fear to lose it, / Thy safety being the motive” (1.1.155-57). I’m drawn to Kent’s bravado, but such total loyalty smacks of self-deception. Fearful of being deceived myself, I take solace in St. Augustine’s words from De Doctrina Christiana: “If [an interpreter ] is deceived in an interpretation that builds up charity, which is the end of the commandments, he is deceived in the same way as a man who leaves a road by mistake but passes through a field to the same place toward which the road itself leads.”[2] If this journey takes me into the weeds of King Lear’s theology, I hope I will at least be guided by the compass of Christian love and headed toward the road of authentic Christian theology by the time this paper ends.
I want to draw attention to an odd detail in Kent’s declaration, “Thou swear’st thy gods,” plural, “in vain.” While Lear has only invoked Apollo in threatening Kent, Kent says that Lear has invoked the “gods” in vain. Throughout the play, characters call on a particular god for a particular task, but that god is always understood as one of many. Whether it be in the form of orbs, stars, heavens, elements, or (most frequently) the gods (the word is used 22 times in the play), characters are calling on a collective group of deities.
Such polytheism was standard for a pagan culture like the one represented in Lear. As William Elton points out in his exhaustive (and, frankly, exhausting) book King Lear and the Gods, “Whatever their particular religious inclination…pagans were, by definition, expected to be polytheistic.”[3] But early modern audiences would not necessarily have expected polytheism—the belief in many gods—to be teamed with religious pluralism—the existence of multiple meaning systems or ideologies for explaining how those gods operate. That is, it’s one thing to encounter characters who call on pagan gods. It’s another to encounter characters who can’t seem to agree on what those gods are supposed to be like or do. There is no pagan orthodoxy within the play, and this is one reason, I argue, there has consequently been no critical orthodoxy on the play either.
The characters themselves change their views on the gods throughout the play, not because of overt supernatural interventions (the play offers us none) but because of their own natural experiences. In Act 3’s torrential storm on the heath, for instance, Lear believes he has an epiphany about what the gods arelike. When he was still in the castle, Lear boldly called on specific gods: Hecate to banish Cordelia, Jupiter to exile Kent, and the goddess Nature to punish Goneril for her unthankfulness. Now on the heath, Lear begins calling on the nameless gods to punish evil then proceeds to collapse the world’s supernatural and natural forces by directly calling on the elements.
We should be wary, however, at taking Lear’s Act III insights at face value. The heath proves to be a tragically inverted version of the green world Shakespeare used so frequently in his comedies, a natural space removed from the play’s normal settings where characters are converted before they return home. In King Lear, the heath gives the illusion of clarity. But Lear’s unaccommodated man proves to be his godson in disguise. And Lear’s unified vision of the natural and supernatural worlds in Act III simply serves as a prelude to the theological confusion of Act IV. It is as though Lear’s naturalistic reduction of the gods to the elements has loosed an unatameable theological energy in the kingdom in the same way that his division of the kingdom released the political ambitions of his daughters and sons-in-law in Act I. In retrospect, it appears Lear has simply brought England’s political structure into closer alignment with its theological beliefs: many gods, many rulers.
In Act IV, we encounter different characters in successive scenes pronouncing conflicting worldviews.
- Gloucester begins Act 4’s first scene by saying, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / they kill us for their sport” (4.1.37-38)
- In the act’s second scene, Albany says “If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences, It will come, Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep” (4.2.47-51). While both men compare humans to animals, they differ drastically in their portayal of the gods. For Albany, they signify hope. For Gloucester? Cruelty. - In scene three, Kent offers a more depersonalized view to explain Cordelia’s relative goodness: “It is the stars, / The stars above us, / govern our conditions; / Else one self mate and mate could not beget / Such different issues” (4.3.31-34). Cordelia’s kindness is not the result of personal gods gracing Mr. and Mrs. Lear with a kind daughter as compensation for Goneril and Regan. Cordelia just happened to be born under a good sign.
- In scene six, Edgar provides the act’s most positive reading of the gods though his declaration comes with myriad caveats. Disguised as Poor Tom, Edgar has fooled Gloucester into thinking they have both walked to the Dover Cliffs where Gloucester wants to commit suicide. When Gloucester swoons at what he thinks is the cliff’s edge, Edgar, still in disguise, revives him and unfolds a story of divine intervention. “Thou happy father,” Edgar instructs Gloucester, “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (4.6.72-74).
- Later in the same scene, Lear declares life “a great stage of fools” that elicits our tears when we enter it (4.6.176-7). Here, the gods remain off-stage, implicitly the scriptwriters and/or audience for a drama of knowledgeable but powerless performers.
- And finally, we have Cordelia in the act’s final scene praying for her father: “O you kind gods, / Cure this great breach in his abused nature!” (4.7.14-15). Poised somewhere between Albany’s plea that the gods tame human offences and Edgar’s avowal of a miracle that defies the laws of gravity, Cordelia prays for her father’s physical and mental restoration.
Each character articulates a connection between the natural and supernatural worlds, but they each articulate that relationship in different, and often contradictory, ways.
If we move outside the text to help adjudicate between the play’s competing theological and political visions, we only enounter more difficulties: pluralism within the text of King Lear itself. In fact, it might be more accurate to talk about King Lears: the 1608 Quarto, the 1623 Folio, and the Frankenstein Conflated Lear that appears in every undergraduate’s Norton Anthology. Not only do the Quarto and Folio differ in genre–the quarto’s title page gives us the History of King Lear while the folio version offers us his Tragedy–the play’s key penultimate couplet—“The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.322-23)—is spoken by Albany in the quarto and by Edgar in the Folio.
This could be the reason why the only one safe critical statement about the play is that it occasions incompatible readings. Twentieth century Christian readings of the play include AC Bradley’s valorization of Cordelia, G. Wilson Knight’s reading of Lear’s journey as purgatorial, and more recent interpretations like Michael Edwards’s 2000 article in Christianity and Literature where he concludes “King Lear is surely an eminently Christian work, whose faith and hope are not in a future world but in this world where, if God seems absent, grace is present.”[4] But over the last fifty years, Lear has been increasingly interpreted as “making a tragic mockery…of both Christian and secular theodicies.”[5] More recent critics have sided with William Elton’s claim that “despite its Christian allusions,” Lear “is intentionally more directly a syncretically pagan tragedy”[6] or Stephen Greenblatt’s argument that the play represents an “emptying out” of the supernatural and constitutes “a drastic swerve from the sacred to the secular.”[7] It is as though the play’s pluralism is so thorough that critics cannot help but replicate it.
We might pause here to consider the way this interpretive disagreement coincides with what Charles Taylor says about our own age’s pluralism in his book A Secular Age. In explaining how pluralism plays a part in the malaise of modernity, Taylor qualifies what he means by the word: “[P]luralism in the sense meant here doesn’t just mean the co-existence of many faiths in the same society, or the same city.” Taylor continues:
As long as the alternative is strange and other, perhaps despised, but perhaps just too different, too weird, too incomprehensible, so that becoming that isn’t really conceivable for me, so long will their difference not undermine my embedding in my own faith…This changes when through increased contact, interchange, even perhaps intermarriage, the other becomes more and more like me, in everything else but faith: same activities, professions, opinions, tastes, etc. Then the issue posed by difference becomes more insistent: why my way, and not hers? There is no other difference left to make the shift preposterous or unimaginable.[8]
Two things strike me about this passage. First: this is such an incredibly apt description of the pluralism in the play itself. Unlike Coriolanus which includes a massive gap in its dramatis personae between the ruling class and unwashed masses, Lear’s entire plot and subplot structure is meant to make us see how interchangeable these characters are and, thus, the similarly interchangeable status of their disparate theological views. Second, and more personally: this is an apt description of my own interpretive conundrums about the play. It is as least partially because of my ability to imagine myself as the skeptical interpreter of Lear—my memories as a graduate student hearing skeptical interpretations of the play from my dissertation advisor in class and over dinner—that it is more difficult for me to reconcile the play’s problematic details with my impulse to find God’s providence working in this tragedy. Increasingly, I have come to see the play’s pervasive pluralism as less an obstacle to a sacred or secular reading and something like the play’s entire point: the embodied experience of living in and interpreting a world without an available orthodoxy.
Given how heavily I have emphasized the divergent theologies articulated by the play’s characters, I would like to end by highlighting an intriguing moment of face-to-face theological agreement in the play’s final act. Ironically, it’s a moment that even normally opposed critics can agree on. A still disguised Edgar has just bested Edmund in battle, and Edmund wants to know who has dealt him the death wound. Edgar says,
“Let’s exchange charity.
I am no less in blood than thou art, Edmund;
If more, the more thou hast wrong’d me.
My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son.
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.” (5.3.165-173)
To which the normally taciturn Edmund responds, “Thou hast spoken right, ’tis true; / The wheel is come full circle: I am here.” While Edgar says he wants to “exchange charity,” his reading of the gods hardly seems charitable. Apparently, the gods have been playing “the long con” with Gloucester, waiting for Edmund to come of age so that he can properly punish Gloucester for begetting him in such an unseemly manner. Even more remarkable is that Edmund, elsewhere the spokesperson for human responsibility, agrees with his half-brother’s interpretation.
But while Edmund may agree, critics, both Christian and secular, do not. G. Wilson Knight writes that Edgar’s “gods are, in fact, man-made.”[9] Michael Edwards responds in a more measured, but still disapproving, fashion, “There is a distance between the general expression of a moral and spiritual principle and its application to an individual, about whose relation with God no one is in a position to judge.”[10] Stanley Wells concurs, observing that, after all, we will learn “in a few moments that Cordelia has been hanged at the order of [Edmund] and under the countenance of those gods.”[11]
I do not have a way to make Edgar’s judgment more appealing. I can only offer an explanation why that judgment sticks in my, and apparently many other critics’, craws. And it is the reason I haven’t been able to hazard a more definitive interpretation of the play. Edgar offers an explicit theodicy, a general prescriptive attempt at defending divine providence that seems unduly harsh and limited. Theodicy is a problem for our secular age, and as Charles Taylor argues, Christianity’s cultural decline is attributable to the fact that it, “poses impossible problems of theodicy. Or it tries to avoid them; being often pusillanimous in proposing to compensate for the most terrible events in history in a future life; or else bowdlerizing in covering up how terrible these events are.”[12] And these are the same thoughts I have about Edgar’s explanation of how his dad lost his eyes. Has Edgar just sworn the gods in vain? The wheel has come full circle, every point on its journey equidistant from its center.
Now the play’s final lines come to my mind, with their choice between speaking what one feels or what one ought to say. Of course, even that choice is split between the quarto’s Albany and folio’s Edgar. I want to say I am Edgar, foolish enough to generalize but brave enough to risk an interpretation. Instead I feel like Albany, hoping visible spirits come quickly down to tame these vile critical offenses, of which mine are chief.
[1] William Shakespeare, King Lear (Conflated Text), in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: Norton, 2008). All references to this text and other plays by Shakespeare are hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line numbers.
[2] From De Doctrina Christiana, qtd. in Alan Jacbos. 2001. A theology of reading the hermeneutics of love. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, p. 16.
[3] Elton, William R. 1966. King Lear and the gods. San Marino, Calif: Huntington Library, p. 115.
[4] Edwards, Michael. 2000. “King Lear and Christendom.” Christianity And Literature 50, no. 1: 15-29, p. 29. I would also mention here John Cox’s insightful reading of King Lear in his book Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (2007. Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press). Cox writes, “One possible inference is that the gods are more responsive to prayers for the kind of remedy Cordelia offers than to other kinds of prayer, and if that is true, then King Lear is far from an atheist tract against Christian hope” (94).
[5] Kott, Jan. 1964. Shakespeare, our contemporary. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 147.
[6] Ibid., 338.
[7] Greenblatt, Stephen. 1985. “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” In After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature, 101-123. University: U of Alabama P, 1985, p. 444.
[8] Taylor, Charles. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 305.
[9] Knight, G. Wilson, and T. S. Eliot. 1949. The wheel of fire: interpretations of Shakespearian tragedy with three new essays. London: Methuen & Co., p. 188.
[10] Ibid., 21.
[11] Wells, Stanley. 1986. Shakespeare survey; 38: [Shakespeare and history]. CUP, p. 164.
[12] Ibid., p. 305.
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