traglear The Tragic Truth of King Lear :: King Lear essays

The Tragic Truth of magnate Lear King Lear is another story of a soul in torment, a purgatorial story. Again the tragical writer has internalized a commonplace action, the facts of which were legendary and presumptively k straight offn to Shakespeares audience. Like the Poet of Job, who dramatized the tragic alternatives to the folk story, and like Marlowe, who saw the agents of tragic dilemma in the story of Faustus, Shakespeare transformed the tale of the mythical, pre-Christian King Lear (who rule over the Britons in the year of the man 3105, at what time Joas govern in Judah) into a dramatic action whose shape and quality restrict 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 copiously illustrated. Nor does the term Christian tragedy make a statement well-nigh the authors f aith or lack of it. It suggests the meeting in a case-by-case 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 approximately but not defining the action, like Horatios flights of angels or the holy pee of Cordelias tears. Marlowe followed out the old story, even to the devils carrying off Faustus amidst thunder but his existent 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 tenet than as a way of dramatizing inner humanity. The one absolute reality that Faustus discovered, and the absolute reality all tragedy affirms and to which Christia n tragedy gives sore 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 stinker 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 oer our heads) and the lowliest, and is at long last caught up in a Greeklike fate that carries the action to a prompt and terrible conclusion.