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The Tragic Truth of King Lear
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King Lear is another story of a soul in torment, a “purgatorial” story. Again the tragic writer has internalized a commonplace action, the facts of which were legendary and presumably known to Shakespeare’s audience. Like the Poet of Job, who dramatized the tragic alternatives to the folk story, and like Marlowe, who saw the elements of tragic dilemma in the story of Faustus, Shakespeare transformed the tale of the mythical, pre-Christian King Lear (“who ruled over the Britons in the year of the world 3105, at what time Joas ruled in Judah”) into a dramatic action whose shape and quality define Christian tragedy in its full development. This is not to say (as it should now be clear) that the play accords with Christian doctrine — certainly not the Christian view of death and salvation, although the values of the Christian ethics are abundantly illustrated. Nor does the term “Christian tragedy” make a statement about the author’s faith or lack of it. It suggests the meeting in a single dramatic action of the non-Christian (Greek, pagan, or humanist) with the Christian to produce a world of multiplied alternatives, terrible in its inconclusiveness — as, for instance, the “terrifying ambiguity” with which Faustus confronts us — in which the certainties of revealed Christianity lose the substance of faith and become only tantalizing possibilities hovering about but not defining the action, like Horatio’s “flights of angels” or the “holy water” of Cordelia’s tears. Marlowe followed out the old story, even to the devils carrying off Faustus amidst thunder; but his actual Hell is humanist (“Where we are is hell,” said Mephistophilis) and, like the Heaven Faustus reached for in the end, functions in the play less as an objective Christian belief than as a way of dramatizing inner reality. The one absolute reality that Faustus discovered, and the absolute reality all tragedy affirms and to which Christian tragedy gives new emphasis and infinite dimension, was the reality of what Christianity calls the soul — that part of man, or element of his nature, which transcends time and space, which may have an immortal habitation, and which is at once the seat and the cause of his greatest struggle and greatest anxiety. Compared with Faustus, King Lear shows this situation in a much vaster ramification, until it seems to touch the highest (“the gods that keep the dreadful pudder o’er our heads”) and the lowliest, and is finally caught up in a Greeklike fate that carries the action to a swift and terrible conclusion.
