"Faires and Gods":  A Socio-Religious Context for _King Lear_

by Jessica Wylie, M.A.

The action of _King Lear_ predates Christianity, a simple fact of
chronology which profoundly complicates the play, depriving it of the
familiar moral context of tragedies like _Hamlet_ which rely heavily on
Christian doctrine to order the action and its consequences.  In _Lear_,
heaven and hell are bodily conditions rather than incorporeal
projections; Lear wishes to make his paradise on earth in the homes of
his daughters and finds just the opposite in the same.  This pagan
universe provides the perfect backdrop to the sense of chaos and despair
created by the action, a chaos which culminates in the seemingly
senseless death of the play's one consistently sympathetic character,
Cordelia.  But pre-Christian England has been imagined as the home of
two very different kinds of paganism, and both can be seen to have a
part to play in influencing the action and outcome of _King Lear_.  As
he prepares to commit suicide by throwing himself from what he thinks is
a high cliff, the king's faithful courtier, Gloucester, blesses his
guide with the words, "Fairies and gods/Prosper it with thee!"
(4.6.29-30).  These are the powers which hold sway in Lear's England,
and the pattern of conflict between them provides a possible order to
the chaos of Lear's tragedy.

As king, Lear maintained the patriarchal order of law represented by the
Olympian pantheon of the Roman conquerors.  All through the play, he
makes references to classical myth and geography, always in positive
terms and nearly always identified with himself.   But when he decides
to divide his kingdom between his daughters, Lear can be said to be
turning England back over to the matriarchal chaos of Celtic witchcraft
represented by the spirits of Nature.  This pattern of conflict between
two socio-religious systems is repeated in the Gloucester subplot by
Edgar, the son of law who feigns the behavior of the bewitched, and
Edmund, the son of the nature who feigns the behavior of the lawful.
Celtic witchery in the persons of Goneril and Regan destroys the reason
of both Lear the man and his kingdom; the men of law are forced to stand
by and watch in horror as these harridans and their paramour, Edmund,
become increasingly powerful and vicious.  Order can only be restored by
Cordelia, a "white witch" who attempts to use her magic to cure her
father's madness and ultimately dies to return the kingdom to lawful
rule.  In doing so, Cordelia becomes, in Celtic terms, what her father
in effect asked her to be in the first scene of the play.  She takes his
place as the physical manifestation of the kingdom, willing to die to
preserve it, becoming a kind of Celtic Christ-figure.  Recognizing at
last what he has required of his beloved child is what kills Lear, and
his death leaves the kingdom in the hands of Edgar, the man of law, who
will presumably keep it in order until the coming of actual Christianity
(at least according to the Folio text).

Shakespeare uses the subplot to introduce this conflict between nature
and law in the opening moments of the play when Gloucester uses these
concepts to describe the contrast between his own two sons, and these
two opposites are immediately gender-identified, nature being female,
law being male.  He emphasizes Edmund's mother's role over his own in
the conception of Edmund, saying, "She grew round-wombed and had indeed,
sir, a son for her cradle [a natural acquisition from her own female
body] ere she had a husband for her bed [a legal acquisition denied her
by the male-dominated probate courts of the day]" (1.1.14-16).
Gloucester goes on to say almost immediately, "But I have a son, sir, by
order of law," meaning Edgar (1.1.19).  From this point on, Edmund is
identified with the natural, fairy world ruled by womb-bearing females,
and Edgar is identified with and is justified by the legal, classical
world historically ruled by males.

When the main plot begins, Lear is operating under the misconception
that his daughters will rule by the same legal order he recognizes,
never conceiving that they could be other- directed.  Lear has the Roman
view of the female as a passive ornament suitable for creating babies
and nursing old men, so he assumes he can turn over his kingdom to his
daughters while still maintaining control from the luxury of their
"nursery."  Goneril and Regan are content not to disabuse him of this
misconception, playing by the rules (laws) of the game of "love" he has
devised to test their worthiness.  Their declarations of affection are
careful rhetorical constructions which sound rather like summations for
a jury, carefully calculated to exploit their father's mental blindness
to any context or motive outside his own.  Only Cordelia reveals her
true nature to her father by refusing to play along, a refusal he
interprets as childish obstinacy, being unable to conceive of any other
motivation for it.

Even when his daughters begin to turn on him, Lear still can't make this
leap of comprehension, still choosing to interpret their behavior in
masculine, Roman terms.  His curse on Goneril, for example:

	Hear, Nature, hear!  Dear goddess, hear!
	Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend
	To make this creature fruitful!
	Into her womb convey sterility;
	Dry up her organs of increase,
	And from her derogate body never spring
	A babe to honor her!  If she must teem,
	Create her child of spleen, that it may live
	And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
	Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,
	With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
	Turn all her mother's pain and benefits
	To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
	How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
	To have a thankless child! (1.4.274-88)

Lear is misinterpreting Nature as a classical personification and with
her his own daughter's powers, motivations and desires.  He thinks
Goneril's beauty and her potential for motherhood are all that matter to
her, so that is what he curses.  He also identifies a daughter with a
serpent here for the first time, a pattern which continues throughout
the play, the serpent/dragon being not only a Judeo-Christian symbol of
evil but also a Celtic symbol of power.

When Regan refuses to ally herself with Lear against Goneril and
suggests that he really doesn't need his retinue, Lear understands her
motives no better than he understood her sister's.  As with Goneril, he
attempts to reason with her in terms he thinks she will understand:
"Thou art a lady:/If only to go warm were gorgeous,/Why nature needs not
what thou gorgeous wear'st,/Which scarcely keeps thee warm"
(2.4.269-71).  Still thinking that beauty is what is important to women,
Lear thinks his daughters should understand vanity and the need to be
"gorgeous" more than any other behavioral motive.  He even invokes the
word "nature" again, but again in a context outside that of his
daughters.  He reads "Nature/nature" as a rhetorical device or a synonym
for the physical world; for Regan and Goneril, nature is spiritual
power.  They refuse to be convinced by their father's appeals to their
vanity and motherly nurturance, recognizing in it the same condescension
they have no doubt endured throughout their lives in this Romanesque
royal court.  Rather than being moved to pity or guilt by Lear's raging
exit into a raging storm, they happily let him go, chatting calmly with
one another about how impossible he is.

Standing beneath the fury of this storm is where Lear first begins to
know nature as his daughters know it and recognize their alliance with
this power.  He tells the thunderclaps:

	But yet I call you servile ministers,
	That will with two pernicious daughters join
	Your high-engendered battles 'gainst a head
	So old and white as this.  O, ho!  'Tis foul!  (3.2.21-4)

Lear begins to realize that the gods he has been calling on may be gone
or merely symbolic, leaving the spiritual world to the control of Celtic
spirits who favor and serve his daughters.  The Fool points out that
Lear made this witchcraft possible by giving power to his daughters in
the first place.  Lear has returned the kingdom that had been
"civilized" by Roman influence back over to the wildness of the Celtic
order.  The Fool neatly appropriates Lear's own mistaken vanity image to
express this, saying, "For there was never yet a fair woman but she made
mouths in a glass" (3.2.35-6).  In other words, if given the chance, a
woman will use the power she has.  After his prophecy, the Fool
reinforces this idea, saying, "This prophecy shall Merlin make for I
live before his time" (3.2.95), meaning he lives in the time of fairy.
Merlin was another powerful old man who lost his power by turning it
over to a beautiful and much younger fairy woman, Nimue/Elaine, his
daughter/lover.

The knowledge that his view of the universe no longer holds together and
that he himself is the one who caused its destruction is what drives
Lear mad, and he spends the rest of the play trying to work out a
context which can contain both his daughters and himself.  In doing so,
he takes comfort in the company of Edgar, the son of law who has also
been turned out of his home by the machinations of nature-worshippers.
Shakespeare makes this character his cipher/key for the entire nature
versus law conflict, a sort of tragi-comedy in miniature.  Edgar is
pretending to be mad, a reasonable man whose reason has been taken by
female magic.  He renounces the witchcraft of females in his false
ravings, saying that lust and striving to please women drove him mad and
even blaming the evil of one of his "demons" on a female "nightmare and
her ninefold" (3.4.120).  Not surprisingly then, Lear finds him better
company than both the Fool and the disguised York, calling Edgar a
"learned Theban" (3.4.155) and a "good Athenian" (3.4.179).  In his
truth-perceiving madness, Lear sees Edgar as another Roman man of law
driven mad by this upside-down world of Celtic female power.  Barbara
Millard, in an essay on Cordelia as the tragic heroine of the play,
writes that "As an old dispossessed man, Lear is as vulnerable in the
female realm of nature as Cordelia is in the male-dominated settings
provided for her trials:  the court and the battlefield.  The entire
import of Act III is that no man can stand in the fierce winds of a true
matriarchy" (Millard 150).

So Lear tries again to make his daughters fit into his own setting,
staging a mock trial of Goneril and Regan in his hovel with the Fool,
York, and Edgar for officers of his court.  In his introduction of to
the play in the edition of the plays cited here, David Bevington places
this trial in opposition to that of Gloucester staged by Regan and
Cornwall:

Justice . . . . is portrayed in two sharply contrasting scenes:  the
mere "form of justice" by which Cornwall condemns Gloucester for treason
(3.7.26) and the earnestly playacted trial by which the mad Lear
arraigns Goneril and Regan of filial ingratitude (3.6).  The appearance
and the reality of justice have exchanged places.  . . . . In the
playacting trial . . . , the outward appearance of justice is
pathetically absurd.  Here, justice on earth is personified by a madman
(Lear), Edgar disguised as another madman (Tom o'Bedlam), and a Fool, of
whom the latter two are addressed by Lear as "Thou robed man of justice"
and "thou, his yokefellow of equity" (lines 36-37).  They are caught up
in a pastime of illusion, using a footstool to represent Lear's
ungrateful daughters.  Yet true justice is here and not inside the manor
house.  (Bevington 1170)

Lear is using this trial to impose a legal, Roman order on the Celtic
witches, even if it is an order which exists only in his own head.  In
the course of the trial, he says, "Then let them anatomize Regan; see
what breeds about her heart" (3.6.75-6).  Lear wants to take his
daughters apart by reasonable methods and make some sort of sense of
them in hopes of making the universe make sense to him again.

Bevington writes that this trial occurs "concurrently" with
Gloucester's, but in fact Gloucester is tried for helping Lear after the
mock trial is over.  With Lear not only powerless but now outside their
physical presence as well, Goneril and Regan are free to exercise their
witchcraft almost at will, with only the constraint of their husbands to
stop them, and this is a state of affairs they will do much to
preserve.  When it is suggested that Gloucester has acted to preserve
the inconvenient king, Goneril orders, "Pluck out his eyes" (3.7.5), and
Regan and her husband, Cornwall, obey.  Jay Halio's essay on this
most-vividly cruel event of the play asserts that Gloucester's blinding
is a symbolic castration of "an acknowledged adulterer" who is "somewhat
proud of the fact " (Halio 222).  When a servant tries to stop them,
Regan takes up a sword and wounds him.  The witches are not only
symbolically castrating a man of law and friend of the father they have
already deprived of manly power, but now they are taking on the
traditionally (and symbolically) male office of swordplay.  As one
servant says to another, "If she [Regan] live long, /And in the end meet
the old course of death, /Women will all turn monsters" (3.7.103-5).
The womb-bearing Celtic witches have not only been set free to express
their own natural power but are now seeking to commandeer the Roman
phallic/masculine power symbolized by the courts and the sword.

Goneril and Regan become so monstrous, in fact, that even their lovers
are forced to notice and protest.  Cornwall has the foresight to die of
the wound he receives from his servant during the blinding incident
where his wife turned swordsman.  Albany, however, lives to see the full
evolution of his wife's character.  When he tries to regain husbandly
control of Goneril and her activities, she calls him a "Milk-livered
man, /That bear'st the cheek for blows" (4.2.51-2).  He calls her a
"devil," declaring her freakish cruelty even more repulsive in a woman
than the same behavior would be in a man and asserting that only her
womanly person prevents him from destroying her.  Goneril replies to
this declamation against her character with the
somewhat-less-than-awestruck, "Marry, your manhood!  Mew!" (4.1.69).  By
the time battle with France comes, Goneril has become as much the
warrior as her sister Regan.  Her steward, Oswald, tells Regan, "Your
sister is the better soldier."  While in contemporary feminist work,
this might be a compliment, within the context of Shakespeare's pagan
tragedy, this very strength is Goneril's weakness and her sister's as
well-a kind a Celtic, feminine _hubris_.  Like their father before them,
these women have made the mistake of wanting it all.

The only man who is himself Roman unnatural/Celtic natural enough to
benefit from the sisters' power is the one who brings it to an
end-Edmund, Gloucester's "natural" son.  When his father is declared a
traitor, blinded, and turned out to die, Edmund takes his father's legal
title and imbrues it with Celtic power drawn from his overtly
legal/covertly sexual alliance with Goneril and Regan.  Even before she
breaks with Albany, when she still tells Edmund, "I  must change names
at home and give the distaff/Into my husband's hands (4.2.17-8), Goneril
demonstrates romantic or at least sexual designs on Edmund, insisting he
seal his vow of fealty to her with a kiss.  Regan wants him as well,
even trying to make Oswald turn over her sister's love letter and
finally instructing the steward to tell his mistress, "Edmund and I have
talked,/And more convenient is he for my hand/Than for your lady's"
(4.5.32-34).  Goneril's response is "I had rather lose the battle than
that sister/Should loosen him and me" (5.1.19-20).  Having determined to
rule and fight by historically and symbolically male methods and
stratagems, they take the traditional male roles of seducer/competitor
in love as well, and these warring affairs of the heart (or whatever)
quickly take precedence over the warring affairs of state in the
attentions of these Celtic queens.

Mad Lear knows lust will destroy his daughters' control even without
physically witnessing their activities, and he expresses this knowledge
in Roman, masculine terms.  Claudette Hoover analyzes this idea in
Lear's centaur speech from Act IV, Scene vi:  "Down from the waist
they're centaurs,/Though women all above" (124-5).  Hoover writes that:

Although the application of the myth to women is _literally_
inappropriate [centaurs traditionally being what she calls
"hypermasculine" creatures] . . . Lear's new awareness of the true
nature of Goneril and Regan has led him to view them-and by extension
all women-as masculine in their verbal, emotional, and physical
violence.  (353)

The use of this creature from classical myth as his metaphor indicates
that Lear is still trying to fit his daughters into a Roman context, but
his madness is making him better able to see them for what they are.

Edgar, who isn't actually mad, can also see what's happening, or at
least the outward results of it, and he becomes his father's guide and
caretaker after Gloucester's blinding.  But being a son of law, Edgar
has no power to right the wrongs of a kingdom now ruled by a natural,
Celtic order.  Lear is mad, Cornwall dead, Albany flummoxed.  Edgar, the
"natural" son, has no motivation to restore order-his only power springs
from chaos.  Only a woman can put right these women's wrongs.  Only
Cordelia, herself a potential witch, can save England from the evil of
these witches, and she must give her life to do it.

The idea of Cordelia as a Christ figure is hardly a new one.  Citing the
Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy XXXIII in 1946,
William R.  Elton writes that, "According to Geoffrey L. Bickerstath,
Shakespeare was 'unconsciously inspired by a story taken . . . . from
Christian mythology,' with Cordelia in the part of Christ" (Elton 26),
and in his analysis of the play written some forty-two years later,
Alexander Leggatt writes:

. . . . Cordelia, "Most choice, forsaken; and most loved despised " (I.i
215) has Christ-associations:  she comes back to England with the words,
"O dear father,/It is thy business that I go about" (IV.iii.23-4
[IV.iv]), echoing Luke 2:49.  The word "hanged" is often used for
Christ's death by crucifixion."  (Leggatt 28)

Even the description of Cordelia's grief at hearing of her sisters'
atrocities and her father's madness reads like a description of the Holy
Virgin:

		. . . . Her smiles and tears
	Were like a better way; those happy smilets
	That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know
	What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence
	As pearls from diamonds dropped.  (4.3.18-22)

Even her tears are described as "holy water from her heavenly eyes"
(4.3.32).

But Lear's England has yet to hear of the Holy Virgin or her Son, even
if the idea of a female Christ was not somewhat problematic in a
traditional context.  Millard identifies Cordelia with Boudicca, the
heroine of a "legend from British Celtic history" who "fought gloriously
against the Roman invaders of her country only to face ultimate defeat .
. . Boudicca had no mind to figure in a Roman triumph, and like several
Shakespearean women of 'manly' courage, she killed herself" (Millard
151).  Being of the same gender and family as Goneril and Regan,
Cordelia recognizes the feminine power of nature and sees in herself the
potential to harness that power just as her sisters have done.  But she
has no political ambition, no personal desire to wield a sword.  She has
been happy in France as a wifely queen to her kingly husband.  But she
returns to England and takes up her natural power because she feels
obligated to do so:  "No blown ambition doth our arms incite,/But love,
dear love, and our aged father's right" (4.4.27-8).  Recognizing the
likely consequences of this Roman-unnatural action, she nevertheless
becomes a Celtic nature-witch.  Her doctor's cures are like magical
incantations, using herbs and music to heal Lear's madness, and Cordelia
herself invokes the white magic of a kiss to awaken her father:

"Restoration hang/Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss/Repair
those violent harms that my two sisters/Have in thy reverence made!"
(4.7.26-9).

But whether or not Cordelia's magic might have eventually cured Lear of
his madness becomes a moot point when they are captured by Edmund.
Things have gone too far; some blood sacrifice must be made to put the
kingdom back in order.  Cordelia realizes this; as a Celtic witch, she
knows that the ruler of the land is also its scapegoat, and she has come
to England to take her father's place not on his throne but in his
grave.  When she and her father are brought in under guard, she is calm,
telling her father, "Shall we not see these daughters and these
sisters?" (5.3.7)  She realizes what is required, and she is ready to
face it.  But Lear is not; he is still trying to reconstruct a
traditional if somewhat unhealthy father-daughter paradise where
Cordelia will be pretty and sweet and nurse him in his old age.  Only
when he sees Cordelia strangled does Lear rouse himself and kill her
murderer-this sight is the magic that cures his madness, even if only
for a moment.  Meanwhile, the other witches have killed each other out
of jealous lust for Edmund, and Edmund himself is killed by Edgar.  All
of these characters have been brought together in one place by
Cordelia's invasion; her arrival from France is the catalyst which
brings her sisters' chaos to the boil that ultimately destroys it and
its darling, Edmund.  As he says, "All three/Now marry in an instant"
(5.3.32-3).

When Lear enters at the end of the play carrying Cordelia's strangled
corpse, Kent and Edgar see this as an apocalypse (again using the Folio
text):  "Is this the promised end-Or image of that horror?"
(5.3.268-9).  Certainly it is the end of Lear.  Operating in the Celtic
universe, Cordelia sees the king of the land as its human
representative, and if the land is sick, the king must die to cure it.
In allowing herself to be hanged, she has taken "a third more opulent"
than her sisters; she has taken her father's place in death.  Lear's
death could be the result of this final stroke of insane knowledge, this
final truth, that he has indeed passed his crown on to his most beloved
child and killed her in the process.  Or perhaps this final, apocalyptic
tableau is meant to signal the end of the pagan era, Celtic and Roman,
and be the precursor of the Christian age to follow.

_Works Cited_

Bevington, David, ed.  Introduction to _King Lear_."  _The Complete
Works of William         Shakespeare_.  New York:  HarperCollins, 1992.
Elton, William R.  _King Lear and the Gods_.  San Marino, California:
The Huntington         Library, 1966.
Halio, Jay.  "Gloucester's Blinding."  _Shakespeare Quarterly 43
(1992):  221-3.  Hoover, Claudette.  "Women, Centaurs, and Devils in
_King Lear_."  _Women's Studies_ 16         (1989):  349-59.
Leggattt, Alexander.  _King Lear_.  Boston:  Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Millard, Barbara C.  "Virago with a Soft Voice:  Cordelia's Tragic
Rebellion in _King         Lear_."  _Philological Quarterly 68 (1989):
143-65.
Shakespeare, William.  _King Lear.  The Complete Works of Shakespeare_.
Ed. David  Bevington.  New York:  HarperCollins, 1992.