The Sanctification of King Lear

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King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece, has been considered by many to be a story of nihilistic despair and even a temporary denial of Shakespeare’s Catholic faith.[1] An analysis from this perspective, however, fails to recognize the fundamentally Catholic worldview of its author which shines through in the manifold layers of sin, humility, self-sacrifice, penance and redemption woven throughout the play. As Ken Colston explains, “The major characters of the play, far from suffering mere chaotic meaningless calamities, all experience redemptive suffering.”[2] Exploring some of these layers can help demonstrate that, far from being a postmodern plunge into the abyss, King Lear is a Catholic redemption story.

As a work of tragedy, considered by many to be Shakespeare’s finest, King Lear can be particularly analyzed according to the foundational principles for tragedy given by Aristotle in his seminal work of literary criticism, The Poetics. From these principles, a deeper investigation can also discover how Shakespeare, while adhering to Aristotelian tragedy with excellence, transformed tragedy according to his Catholic worldview, with the play concluding as a story of redemption and self-sacrifice.

The central elements of a tragic plot according to Aristotle, namely Purgation (of fear and pity), Complication, Unraveling, Scenes of Suffering, Reversal and Recognition, are all effected in the body of the play. Adhering to character and logical consistency, Shakespeare unfolds the plot without recourse to the irrational devices which Aristotle described as lowering the artistry of the drama.[3]

In King Lear’s beginning scenes, Complication is immediately developed, as the competing interests of the king with his heirs (Albany, Cornwall, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia) evoke the first instance of pity by a twofold incident: the lack of affection shown by Cordelia to her father the King, and Lear’s subsequent wholesale rejection of his most authentic and favorite daughter in rage against her perceived indifference. By the tragedy primarily involving the King, whose fall from prominence is the form of the action, Shakespeare also fulfills Aristotle’s statement that the main protagonist of the tragedy should be “a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous”.[4] Error is Lear’s first cause of misfortune, while frailty will be the second cause later in the plot.

As the story unfolds, the secondary protagonists of the play, namely Gloucester, Kent, Edgar and Cordelia, are involved in the Unraveling of the Complications. Lear, forced out of his ancestral home by his greedy and treacherous daughters Goneril and Regan, wanders into madness in the wilderness which, with his advanced age, represents the misfortune of frailty prescribed by Aristotle. Gloucester, who first unwittingly betrays his noble son Edgar in favor of his villainous bastard Edmund, is eventually involved in one of the most powerful Scenes of Suffering in the play, when he is accused of treason for aiding Lear and is subsequently blinded by Cornwall and the machinations of his wife, Regan; he then, like Lear, falls into an insane despair. Edgar, who fled from his father by the deceitful warnings of his half-brother, takes on a disguise and himself becomes another compatriot of Lear, alongside Kent, who was also banished from the kingdom and adopts his own secret identity in order to help the exiled King. The betrayals of Lear and Gloucester by their close relations can be seen as instances of Reversal, in which the powerful leaders’ prominence and trust in the faithfulness of some of their children above others is reversed to their own misfortune.

The climax of the play brings together all of Aristotle’s principles with supreme artistry, as Aristotle said is done by the best poets.[5] Kent and Edgar’s disguises are removed, and their identities revealed in Recognition as Kent fends off a French invasion and Edgar foils Edmund’s plots in a duel. Seeing Edmund’s deceit of themselves and their own inevitable misfortunates, Goneril and Regan are similarly brought to justice, in a way, by their suicides, but two more Scenes of Suffering – the murder of Cordelia and subsequent death of Lear – cause the strongest Purgations of both fear and pity, as neither event can be averted and are ultimately undeserved.

Beyond these Aristotelian elements of tragedy, however, Shakespeare elevates his story through his Catholic faith. Redemption in King Lear centers upon three specific characters: Lear himself, Gloucester and Edmund. In the opening scenes of the play, Lear’s pilgrimage begins with what can be considered sins of weakness rather than malice, as he is “[m]ore sinned against than sinning.”[6] Deceived by his two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, who put on masks of cloying affection for him, to which he vainly succumbs and gives over his kingdom to them, he then rashly rejects his favorite daughter, Cordelia, who is both the most genuine and the least effusively affectionate. Lear is soon betrayed, thrown out of his ancestral palace and treated as a traitor and burden. He then wanders in the wilderness, learning humility through suffering, until finally meeting his redemption and death. He journeys, as Rodney Delasanta notes, “from clueless egoism, to heroic self-pity, to empathy for the suffering of others, to a grace-provoked, unbuttoned leap of faith, in the final seconds of his life, to transcendence itself.”[7]

Similarly, Gloucester, rejecting his loyal son Edgar after trusting the deceptions of his bastard son Edmund, is then blinded by Regan’s husband Cornwall as a traitor and exiled for his loyalty to Lear. Overwhelmed by despair, he comes close to suicide, but is saved by the ministrations of Edgar disguised as a demon-possessed beggar; rising out of his darkness, Gloucester is effectively exorcised. As “some fiend” departs from Gloucester, Edgar attributes this redemption to “the clearest gods”[8] rather than to himself, which Greg Maillet explains is an implied reference to Christ: “If this reminds us of Christ, and of the Christian gospel, it is probably intended”.[9] Joseph Pearce summarizes: “Lear and Gloucester lose everything in the worldly sense but, in the process, gain the wisdom they were lacking.”[10] Finally, Edmund, in the climax of the story, repents of his sins and even attempts to avert the scheme, which is now inevitable, that he hatched to murder the imprisoned Cordelia: “I pant for life: some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature.”[11] Despite falling to a death befitting his crimes, his redemption is perhaps the most poignantly Christian of all.

Self-sacrifice is most clearly seen in Edgar, Kent, Albany and Cordelia. The first two, who are forced to flee from their home due to the lies of Edmund and loyalty to Lear, respectively, take on disguises and aid Lear and Gloucester during their sojourns in the wilderness, and in the climax, both remove their disguises – Edgar in a fatal duel against his brother and Kent in order to fight off a French invasion in which he suffers a mortal wound himself, exemplifying Christ’s teaching that “[g]reater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15:13 DRV) In their accompaniment of their exiled lords, Edgar and Kent also become Christ-figures, following, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes, “the road Christ himself walked, a way of poverty and obedience, of service and self-sacrifice even to death”.[12] Albany, at first a reluctant conspirator with his wife Goneril, eventually sees her true character and becomes an ally of Lear, Edgar and Kent, helping to stop Edmund and combat the French invaders. Cordelia, the tragic heart of the play, is murdered by the machinations of Edmund out of pure spite and hatred of Lear and his father. Absent for much of the play but remaining ever loyal to Lear, in her death she fulfills her whispered promise given before her disownment: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, / and be silent.”[13]

Justice is brought most clearly by the deaths of Goneril, Regan and Cornwall, all of whom conspired against their innocent relations and committed grave evils, including the banishing of Lear, the blinding of Gloucester and, in the case of Goneril and Regan, an adulterous love triangle with Edmund. After Cornwall is killed by a loyal servant who attempts to protect Gloucester, Goneril and Regan fall to an even worse sentence: both commit suicide after realizing that they were deceived by Edmund and will soon be punished. By their suicides, it could be said that they avoided justice; from Shakespeare’s Catholic worldview, however, they only bring themselves from earthly justice to heavenly justice.

As David Beauregard writes, “King Lear is indeed… the postulated depiction of a pagan world placed against an implied theistic background and showing us the starkness of a world subject to human malevolence.”[14] The “implied theistic background” is brought to the forefront in its Catholic storylines of redemption, self-sacrifice and justice which reflect Shakespeare’s own deeply Catholic worldview. King Lear is at once a consummate example of an Aristotelian tragedy in its highest form, and a poignant Catholic redemption story. While its many other elements may be examined as well, these are its most pivotal and significant qualities according to the dramatic art of the Christian tragedian of which Shakespeare is the chief representative in history.

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[1] David N. Beauregard, “Human Malevolence and Providence in King Lear,” Renascence 60, no. 3 (2008), 199.

[2] Ken Colston, “King Lear and the Catholic Drama of Three Households and Four Loves,” Logos 16, no. 4 (2013), 22.

[3] Aristotle, Poetics (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), 28.

[4] Aristotle, Poetics, 23.

[5] Aristotle, Poetics, 35.

[6] William Shakespeare, King Lear (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 93.

[7] Rodney Delasanta, “Putting off the Old Man and Putting on the New: Ephesians 4:22-24 in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, and Dostoevsky,” Christianity and Literature 51, no. 3 (2002), 44.

[8] Shakespeare, King Lear, 147.

[9] Greg Maillet, Learning to See the Theological Vision of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 90.

[10] Joseph Pearce, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 168.

[11] Shakespeare, King Lear, 187.

[12] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2020), 852. Kindle.

[13] Shakespeare, King Lear, 6.

[14] Beauregard, “Human Malevolence,” 199.