ILLUMINA SERIES
KING LEAR : A Model Christian Tragedy
Chanchal Chauhan
In the critical discourse on Shakespeare’s
tragedies the theme of redemption does often come up for discussion.
These plays are generally categorised as Christian tragedy. One eminent
critic once posed a question, is tragedy possible in Christianity when
‘God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.’ He, then, himself
suggested that the Christian tragedy is just like ‘divine comedy’, in
which the protagonist commits a sin, then undergoes suffering of
an Inferno, purified by those sufferings in Purgatorio and by the end
redeemed of his sin by death so as to enter into the realm of eternal
peace of the Paradiso. This process takes place in almost all of the
tragedies by Shakespeare. But his King Lear is the model among
Christian tragedies just as Oedipus, the King is the model of the classical tragedy. Stanley Wells is right when he remarks”
The play recalls the literature as well as the
forms of religion too, in its obvious concern with moral and ethical
issues exemplified in its frequent use of moralising remarks, often
proverbial in origin and structurally in its resemblances to morality
plays.
—Stanley
Wells, Shakespeare: The Poet and His Plays, p.266. Here it will not be out of
place to compare and contrast Christian tragedy with classical tragedy.
The thematic structure of classical tragedy was based on a kind of
determinism that man could not transcend his limitations. All Greek
myths of classical antiquity whether those were of Oedipus or Icarus or
Prometheus conveyed the same message. (Epic heroes in Indian classicism
too were created with the similar thematic structure based on
determinism.) The ideology of determinism was the product of slavery
system so as to keep slaves under domination by conveying through
classical literary works this message that man could not transcend his
limitations. Oedipus tried his best to undo what was destined to happen
to him, but it did happen. Icarus tried to reach the sun by breaking
the limit of human existence, he fell. Prometheus too tried to
transcend human limitations, he was bound with rocks. It is, perhaps,
this motive that under slavery system even Aristotle had to define the
cathartic function of tragedy that it aroused ‘pity and fear’.
As against the classical
tragedy, the Christian tragedy had to weave in its texture the concept
of Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve. The Sin is redeemed by the
sacrifice of some innocent Christ-like figure. This Christian
consciousness operates in almost all of Shakespearean tragedies.
Desdemona, in Othello, Ophelia in Hamlet, Cleopatra in Antony and
Cleopatra, and Cordelia in King Lear are those innocent lives
that are sacrificed to redeem the sin committed by the respective
protagonists. The various elements of the Christian tragedy in
balanced proportion find place in King Lear, and, therefore, it may be
considered as the model.
Shakespeare in the very
exposition of the plot of the play makes the protagonist commit a sin.
In the opening Scene Gloucester expresses his love for Edmund, who is a
son out of legal marriage, and tells Kent, ‘the whoreson must be
acknowledged.’ And then King Lear, the protagonist plans to
divide his kingdom among his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and
Cordelia on the basis of expression of the quantum in the words of
their love for the king. First he asks Goneril to express her love. She
takes recourse to hyperbole and untruth :
Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter;
Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour…
( L.55-8, I,i)
King Lear is very much pleased with this kind of falsehood and allots her one third of his empire. And then asks Regan, the second daughter ‘dearest Regan’, who speaks:
I am made of that self metal as my sister,
And prize me at her worth.
I find she names my very deed of love;
Only she comes too short….
(L.70-3, I,i.)
King Lear is very much pleased with her false
flattery and allots her also the one third of his kingdom. And then he
asks Cordelia, ‘what can you say to draw/A third more opulent than your
sisters?” Cordelia replies, ‘Nothing, my lord’. Lear is very much
annoyed with her and threatens her: ‘Nothing will come of
nothing: speak again.’
Cordelia in the play stands for
truth. ‘I love your Majesty, /According to my bond; no more no less.’
When the King insists her to ‘mend your speech,’ she elaborates the
truth and exposes the falsehood of her sisters. ‘Why have my sisters
husbands, if they say/ They love you all?’ When King Lear comments on
her behaviour, ‘So young, and so untender?’ Cordelia tells
her father, ‘So young, my lord, and true.’ King Lear punishes her
for speaking the truth:
Let it be so, thy truth then be thy dower…
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity, and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever.
(L.112-20,I,i)
He takes her truth as ‘pride’ ( a sin that he
himself commits.). ‘Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry
her.’(l.134,I,i) When Kent tries to pacify the King, he too
becomes the victim of his wrath and pride. The sane advice by Kent is
also taken as’pride’ (l. 176, I,i) and then he too is asked to leave
his kingdom after the grace period of five days. Cordelia, the
‘dowerless daughter’ is accepted by the king of France to be his Queen.
Thus Kent and Cordelia who stand for truth leave king Lear. While
taking leave of her sisters, Cordelia comments: ‘Time shall unfold what
plighted cunning hides/Who cover fault, at last with shame derides.’
(L.297-8, I,i.)
Thus Shakespeare in King Lear
shows in the opening scene itself the deadly sins being committed by
the protagonist. He also juxtaposes Gloucester’s love for Edmund, ‘the
whoreson’, and Lear’s disclaiming Cordelia, his lawful daughter.
Edmund conspires against his brother Edgar; Goneril and Regan conspire
against their father and sister. The atmosphere of a sinful world is
thus created in the beginning so as to prepare the background of a
Christian tragedy. Just as Adam and Eve after committing the Original
Sin lose their kingdom in the paradise, and lead a life of ‘woe’, so
does Lear. Kent had warned King Lear in plain words, ‘ I’ll tell thee
thou dost evil’ (l.173, I,i). Goneril and Regan, the satanic
powers, motivated by the greed for wealth take over Lear’s
kingdom, and throw the old king out of the palace. In the sub-plot
Edmund represents the satanic power and does wrong to his father and
brother. He does not believe in just God, he believes in Nature. He
says, ‘Thou Nature, are my goddess; to thy law/My services are bound.’
Goneril shows her true colours in the Scene III itself when she complains of her father to Oswald, her steward :
By day and night, he wrongs me; every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other
That sets us all at odds: I’ll not endure it.
(L.4-6, I,iii)
She directs Oswald to disobey the king and advise
his knights also to ignore his orders. Kent out of his love for the
king, returns in disguise as a common man and requests the king to give
him a chance to serve. The king is pleased with him and appoints him as
a servant. Lear now enjoys the company of Kent in disguise and also of
the Fool who entertains him with his rustic irony. He tells the king
that he too is a fool now. Lear asks his Fool, ‘Dost thou call me fool,
boy?, the Fool tells him the truth: ‘All thy other titles
thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.’
And then Goneril appears on the
scene and accuses her father of keeping unruly and ill-mannered men in
the court, ‘Men so disorder’d, so debosh’d, and bold, /That this our
court, infected with their manners,/Shows like a riotous inn: epicurism
and lust/ Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel/Than a grac’d
palace.’ Lear now faces the reality, the reality of
‘ingratitude’. He is enraged, and furious. His fifty followers are
sacked. He curses Goneril for showing her disrespect to her
father. Shakespeare uses animal imagery in his depiction of Goneril. He
calls her ‘detested kite’ and exclaims with agony, ‘How sharper than a
serpent’s tooth it is/To have a thankless child!’
Lear hopes that Regan, his
second daughter may treat him well. He wishes to go to her. The wise
Fool tells him the truth that she too is like the first one. When Lear
reaches Regan’s palace, she and her husband Cornwall pretend to be ill.
But when he insists on seeing them, they appear before him. Regan
advises Lear to go back to Goneril and ask her for forgiveness:
‘…I pray you / That to our sister you do make return;/ Say you have
wrong’d her.’ Lear tells Regan that Goneril ‘struck me with her
tongue,/ Most serpent-like, upon the very heart…’. He still has the
hope that Regan will support him. Goneril reaches the spot and again
there is a quarrel between Lear and Goneril. Regan too stands firm with
Goneril. She goes one step further, and tells her father that she could
accommodate only twenty-five followers of the king and not even fifty.
And then Goneril and Regan tell him in plain words that the king does
not need any of those followers. They are not needed at all. And then
there is storm outside. It coincides with the storm inside Lear’s mind.
‘O Fool ! I shall go mad.’ Doors of Regan’s house are also
shut and the king with his followers leaves for the wild forest
in the stormy night.
Thus Shakespeare dramatises in
the first two acts the protagonist’s sin and then the Inferno through
which he passes. The Act III may be taken as Purgatorio where his sins
are purged. In the beginning of Act III Kent is informed by a Gentleman
about the whereabouts of Lear who is ‘contending with the fretful
elements’. The king has by his side only his Fool and no one else. Kent
and the gentleman go inside the forest to find out Lear. In the Scene
ii, we see Lear in his Purgatory. He invokes all elements of purgatory
to strike and ‘singe my white head.’.
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!
(L.2-6, III,ii)
When Kent appears on the scene, he advises the
king, ‘Love not such nights as these.’ But Lear is ready to undergo the
sufferings in his purgatorio. In his ravings he confesses: ‘I am a man/
More sinn’d against than sinning.’
This concept of sin is central
to Christian tragedy and the playwright has put this confession
structurally in the centre of the play. When Kent insists that Lear
should go inside the hovel, he (Lear) refuses to obey him. He says,
‘I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.’ After this there is the famous
speech in which King Lear empathises himself with the homeless, poorest
of the poor and tells his own royal being:
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.
(L.36-38, III,iv)
When Edgar disguised as a beggar comes out of the
hovel, Lear talks in his mad state to him and thinks that he too has
given all his property to his daughters. Thus he justifies the
punishment to his body and flesh in Christian terms:
Judicious punishment ! ‘t was this flesh begot
These pelican daughters.
(L.73-74,III,iv)
The condition of poor Edgar reminds Lear that
‘unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as
thou art...’ Then he becomes naked to punish that flesh. At this stage
Gloucester appears on the scene and he also speaks in Christian terms,
‘Our flesh and blood, my Lord, is grown so vile, that it doth hate what
gets it.’ Edgar in his concocted madness talks of ‘fiend’ (Satan) again
and again. ‘Pray, innocent, and Beware the foul fiend.’. ‘ The foul
fiend bites my back.’ ‘The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a
nightingale.’. All these dialogues contain Christian overtones. And
then Gloucester informs Kent that the life of Lear and his supporters
is in danger. All of them should go towards Dover to save themselves.
Gloucester is taken prisoner for this and treated as traitor by Regan
and Cornwall, Edmund gave her husband the information about him.
Gloucester’s eyes are destroyed by Cornwall and he reveals what Edmund
did to him. Gloucester, now blind, also repents, ‘O my follies!
The Edgar was abus’d./ Kind Gods forgive me that, and prosper him.’ He
repents before Edgar also. And with his help proceeds towards Dover.
Albany, Goneril’s husband does
not support his wife and condemns her for her vileness. He asks
Goneril, ‘What have you done?/ Tigers, not daughters, what have
perform’d!’ He calls them ‘most barbarous, most degenerate’. And
Goneril retorts by addressing him as a ‘moral fool’ Albany exclaims
with anguish, ‘See thyself, devil !/ Proper deformity shows not in the
fiend/ So horrid as in woman.’ He again and again calls Goneril
as ‘fiend’.The imagery used to depict the character of villains in the
play denotes Christian metaphors.
Scene III of Act IV shows us
the personality of Cordelia as reported to Kent by the gentleman
who delivered his letter to her. If we scrutinise closely the poetic
language used by Shakespeare, we may have no doubt how he is creating a
mini-Christ in the figure of Cordelia. The Gentleman reports to Kent
Cordelia’s reaction to the letter describing the condition of her
father and ill-treatment meted out to him by Goneril and
Regan: ‘Not to rage; patience and sorrow strove/Who
should express her goodliest..’ ‘…once or twice she heav’d the
name of ‘father’..’
There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes,
And clamour moisten’d , then away she started
To deal with grief alone.
(L.29-33, IV.iii)
Cordelia moves out along with a doctor to search
for her ailing father in the forest to provide him treatment. She is
informed that the British troops march to invade France. She is not
disturbed and tells the messenger in her composed mood that she knew
about the imminent invasion. France was in readiness to face the
invasion. But again we find Christ-like qualities in her character that
it was not her ambition to expand the French empire, but she was
prepared to fight for saving her father from the deprivation of his
right that .
No blown ambition doth our arms incite
But love, dear love, and our ag’d father’s right
(L.27-28, IV,iv)
She searches for her father, who is passing through his Inferno and Purgatory. In his madness, he says:
…There ‘s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulphurious pit – burning, scalding,
(L.125-6, IV,vi)
A Gentleman who also searches for Lear finds him
in that mad condition, burning his soul in the purgatorio. L.C.Knights
too remarks on this scene almost in the similar terms: ‘This suggests
purgatory rather than hell: the shame is ‘burning’…(‘King Lear: And the
Great Tradition’, in The Age of Shakespeare, p.238). The Gentleman in
the play tells the mad king that the redemption is not too far:
Thou hast one daughter,
Who redeems nature from the general curse
Which twain have brought her to
(L.201-3, IV, vi)
The dialogue is loaded with double meaning, it
places Cordelia in the category of the Christ-figure, ‘general curse’
may be interpreted as ‘original sin’ and ‘twain’ as Adam and Eve also.
In the play, they appear to be related to Goneril and Regan, but
Shakespeare uses ambiguity in the language. Similarly, when Lear gets
treatment and recovers, he speaks of Cordelia as ‘a soul in bliss’. He
repents and says: ‘Pray you now, forget and forgive: I am old and
foolish.’ This journey from falsehood and pride to truth and
humility leads him into the state of Paradiso. But for his redemption
the Christ-like figure has to be sacrificed.
In the final Act, France loses
the battle, Cordelia and Lear are taken prisoners. But even under that
condition Lear is happy in the company of his Cordelia. Lear tells
Cordelia,’Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia/The Gods themselves throw
incense.’ Edgar, ‘the fiend’ and arch-villain in the play hatches a
plan to get Lear and Cordelia killed in the prison. But his
conspiratorial acts are exposed by Edgar in the end of the play and
then he confesses his sins also before his own end. However, the life
of Cordelia cannot be saved. She is killed in the prison. And Lear
appears on the stage with the dead body of Cordelia and becomes mad
again: ‘And my poor fool is hang’d ! No, no, no life!’ If he lives, his
life will be hell without Cordelia. He dies of the shock. And that is
his redemption.
King Lear is thus justified to be a model Christian tragedy.