King Lear and the Catholic Drama of Three Households and Four Loves

“That word love, which greybeards call divine.”

henry vi, part iii

Hardly anyone now reads the world’s greatest work of literature for its dramatization of Catholic wisdom. By the 1960s, according to R. A. Foakes, critical opinion had crowned King Lear as Shakespeare’s greatest play, and it is still indeed common to hear it maintained that Lear is the greatest work of literature ever written in any language. Foakes attributes this rise mainly to the apocalyptic and nihilistic mood of the Cold War. And yet during the same period, he points out, the accepted reading of Lear changed from that of a play concerned with a “pilgrimage to redemption” to one offering “Shakespeare’s bleakest and most despairing vision of suffering, all hints of consolation undermined or denied.”¹

It is not surprising that a nihilistic, skeptical age would see only nihilism and skepticism in King Lear. To be sure, the play has some of the ugliest, darkest minutes in all of literature: two ungrateful daughters strip their aged father of his property and drive him outdoors unprotected into a raging storm as he declines into raving madness; a betrayed spy of the state has both eyes gouged out on stage, one in cruel jest; a father reconciled to his only loving daughter finds her hanged right after their reconciliation, and another father suffers from a broken heart when he learns that he has wronged his loving son; throughout it all, the cosmic order seems indifferent and even hostile.

This pessimistic action, however, is less than half the story. Consider these events, which are much more than “hints of consolation”: the two ungrateful and evil sisters perish in their own iniquity by poisoning and suicide; an evil son, “touched by love,” albeit adulterous, recognizes his sinfulness and countermands his execution order with a last-minute (although too late) pardon, a radical act of gratuitous mercy; an unjustly treated son ministers to the very father, himself unjustly blinded, who has mistreated him, with no hope of reward and no effort to reveal his identify, in yet another radical act of gratuitous mercy; a banished suffering servant continues to serve the very king who has banished him for truth-telling at the risk of his own life, being put in the stocks, like Charity in a morality play, turning treason into love; a king’s hired fool loves the king to the point of a broken heart despite the king’s foolishness and the imperatives of his own clear-eyed worldly wisdom; and there are numerous other acts of redemption. In the final reckoning, all the evil characters die, but some of the good ones survive. How can so many modern interpreters remain unmoved by this catalog of consolations? It is as if King Lear’s famous last words (in the Folio edition), which declare the glorious resurrection of his beloved daughter, “Look, look there!” fall on blinded eyes, to mix a metaphor, those of our own narrowed age that cannot see the “mystery of things” glimpsed by Cordelia and Lear in their reconciliation.

A modern skeptic may look at the bountiful unbidden generosity of Edgar, the Fool, Albany, Kent, Edmund, Cordelia, and Lear and see nothing but human beings who express simple human compassion for victims of catastrophe, but Shakespeare saw it, I believe, because he saw human beings in the Christian light of fallen nature, redeemed possibility, resurrected hope—in a word, as touched by God’s grace. He was not a Buddhist who saw the world as illusion, a secular humanitarian like Camus’s Rieux who sought to combine enjoyment of the world with service to humanity, a Taldmudic rabbi who looked for halachic clarity and purity in daily living, but rather a baptized Christian, married and buried as a Christian and perhaps according to Roman rites, whose deeply formed manner of thinking followed Christian dramatic lines and categories. For Shakespeare, traditional Christianity is mere Catholicism.

What is the worth of forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption, however momentarily comforting, when the heavens are silent? The answer...