Of her I take my leave forever, De leis pren comjat per jasse,This conclusion is not the typical troubadour one: they usually do not criticize themselves for loving, but only the other for not loving. Yet most of what Cardenal is saying fits Lear's experience, even though Lear’s setting is filial rather than romantic love. In storming out, away from both his older daughters, he "takes" his "leave forever." Like Cardenal, he compares them to serpents, the animals with venom, they who had seemed so sweet before (II.ii.350). They have certainly lacked "faith or fairness" in his eyes. From Cardenal’s list, guile and deceit are all that he has not charged them with. Finally, like Cardenal, Lear has commented on the blindness of love, in his remark about "blind Cupid," (IV.vi.134), and on how it has led him into danger. The song ends in a way that points to Lear's abuse of Cordelia and Kent as another part of his folly.
So that I may nevermore be hers; Que ja mais sieus non sia;
For not once did I find faith or fairness in her, Qu’an jorn no.i trobei lei ni fe,
But only guile and deceit. Mas engan e bauzia.
Ah! Sweetness, full of venom, Ai! Doussors plena de vere,
How love blinds the seeing man Qu’amors eissorba sel que ve
And leads him astray E l’osta de sa via,
When he loves that which ill behooves him, Quant ama so qu’ilh descove,
And that which he ought to love E so qu’amar deuria
Quits and distrusts! Gurp e mescre!
(Press 1971, 283-285)
Those last two lines also suggest that more may be at stake than romantic love, or even love between parent and child: The object of love is a "that which" (“so qu’,” short for “so que”) instead of a "she who." In such a case, "that which ill behooves him" could be a religion or an ideology as much as a person. Cardenal's medieval editors say that as a youth he had been a canon in the Catholic Church. One might wonder whether he might be blasting his excessive devotion and trust in that institution, given what it did later to the people and culture of his land. Perhaps when the Cathars were first attacked he distanced himself from them--that is, sought to "quit and distrust that which he ought to love," in the words of the song. In a world where suspicion of heresy could lead to imprisonment and dispossession of one's property at least, it was best not to be specific, and to let one's hearers interpret the moral themselves.
Such a perspective suggests another level in interpreting Lear's story. Lear's elder daughters, like most of those around him, had praised him as a god, in fact the god of Plato and orthodox Christianity, so perfect as to be beyond words and to whom other love is subordinate. Once humbled, Lear sees such praise as "no good divinity" (Iv.vi.99-100). On the level of divinity, this tale is not only about families, but about a social structure, patriarchal or not, that demands to be held in awe and lashes out when its evils and vulnerabilities are exposed.
But there is more here even than politics. It is a critique of any religion that sacrelizes that style of rule. What I see in Shakespeare here, as in Cardenal, is an echo of Gnosticism, specifically, its critique of the jealous God of the Hebrew Bible, whom the Gnostics called by various names: e.g. Yaldabaoth, Error, and demiurge. The word “demiurge,” meaning craftsman or artificer, came from Plato’s Timaeus, in which he imagined a lower level god doing the work of making the world, following patterns laid out by a higher god. For the Gnostics, such a craftsman was a highly imperfect one, a maker of counterfeits. The Cathars, the remnant of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, carried on this tradition and denounced the God of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches as a “dieu etranh,” an alien god, as opposed to the “dieu juste,” the true god whom they worshiped (Nelli 1976, 38-39).
In Shakespeare's day, kings were seen as being to their lands what God was to his creation; kings ruled as the image of Providence. Lear's acts at the beginning of the play mimic those of the god of Genesis. First comes the void, Lear’s “nothing.” From this nothing came everything, the opposite of Lear’s maxim Next, the god divided light from dark and above from below; similarly, Lear divides his kingdom. In Lear's case, he is unintentionally creating disorder out of order, the reverse of Genesis (Calderwood 1987). Soon enough, we see the god of Genesis in Lear’s curses, first at Cordelia, then at Kent, and finally at his elder daughters. What is this but the same reaction to disobedience that Jehovah exhibits, cursing the beings that he has created in his image, first Eve, then Adam, then Cain, then all humanity except Noah and his family?
Later, in his "madness," Lear sees his earlier self as ungodly, “no good divinity.” Yet it is not that he saw the god of Genesis wrongly; rather, he sees the shortcomings of that god as embodied in himself. Now he is becoming Gnostic; for orthodox Christianity accepts even the god of Genesis as the one true god. This is where his, and Shakespeare's, insight lies, Gnostic in the very specific sense of the summaries contained in the polemical writings of Irenaeus and the ancient texts that correspond to them.
The Gnostics argued that the orthodox Judeo-Christian god--and by implication any institution modeling itself after that God--could not be the true god because of his faults--e.g. blatant favoritism, rages, and cruelty toward people who defied him (Williams 1996, Chapter 1). Gnostic texts called him arrogant, blind (in the sense of ignorant), and foolish. An example is from the Apocryphon (i.e. Secret Book) of John, one of a group of texts found in Egypt in 1945:
Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, “I am God and there is no other God beside me"... (Robinson 1988, 111-112)This text also describes him as a "lion-faced serpent" (110). The roaring lion and the quick-striking serpent are images that would apply as well to Lear.
Yaltabaoth (also spelled "Yaldabaoth") means "Father of Abaoth," according to Rudolph (1983) a reference to Sabaoth, mentioned by several texts as the demiurge's son. “Child of chaos” is another possibility (Quispel 1965, 75). Another text, The Origin of the World, says that the name means "Child, pass through to here," words spoken by his mother Pistis Sophia (Faithful Wisdom) when he emerged from "the abyss," “chaos,” or "shadow" that she had caused to exist outside "the eternal realm of truth" (Robinson 1988, 173).
"Saklas" means "fool" in Hebrew (Barnstone 1984, 75). "Samael," The Origin of the World says, means "blind god" (Robinson 1988, 175). (In Judaism, it was also a name for Satan.) He is arrogant in that he thinks he is the source of all power: Another characteristic is his ignorance: "He is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come." The demiurge also declares 'I am a jealous god" (112), he will countenance no other gods, reminding us again of the god of Genesis and Moses.
The texts attribute these four characteristics to the God of Genesis: foolishness, blindness, arrogance, and jealousy. All these labels apply abundantly to Lear. We have already seen how the Fool has implicitly been telling Lear he is a fool. To make the point explicit, Shakespeare has Lear himself ask the Fool: "Are you calling me fool, boy?" (I.iv.141); the Fool replies, "Thou hast given away all thy other titles; that thou wast born with" (I.iv.142-143). Later Lear applies this label to himself: "I am the natural fool of fortune" (IV.vi.195).
As for blindness in the sense of ignorance, the idea is implicit in a remark that Gloucester, Lear's same-age friend, makes after being literally blinded by Lear’s son-in-law: "I stumbled when I saw," (IV.1.21), meaning that he was blind to who was good and who was evil. Sight vs. blindness is also the dominant image in an early exchange between Kent and Lear, when. Kent objects to his treatment of Cordelia. When Lear orders him out of his sight, Kent replies: "See better, Lear" (I.i.159), implying Lear’s blindness to what he is doing. When Lear then swears by Apollo, god of light, Kent replies, "Thou swear'st thy gods in vain" (I.i.162).
Lear’s arrogance is evident in his treatment first of Cordelia, who refuses to pledge all her love to Lear, and then Kent, who says Lear is being too harsh toward Cordelia. He thinks he knows everything, and he lashes out at anybody contradicting him.
As for Lear's jealousy, by disinheriting Cordelia he hopes to prevent her marriage, which would mean her departure from him. And like Juliet's father in Romeo and Juliet, he is jealous of any authority she follows other than his, including her own.
The Gnostics’ prime example of Jehovah’s display of these traits is his behavior in the Garden of Eden. Having created the first humans, Jehovah—or Ialdabaoth, as the texts call him--wants total, unquestioning obedience. When they immediately disobey, following the teachings of the serpent, Ialdabaoth takes away their immortality and throws them out. They will have to fend for themselves. But he demands absolute worship even then, sending a flood to destroy humanity when they are insufficiently devout. When Moses later kills the devotees of the Golden Calf, he is only following his mentor’s example, and providing a model for Christian kings to follow.
When Lear disinherits Cordelia and banishes Kent, he is only following the example of the God of Genesis. In orthodox Christianity, the sin is all Adam and Eve’s. In Shakespeare, obviously, Cordelia and Kent are the good guys and Lear the vain fool. Gnostic Christianity and Shakespeare are on the same side. Actually, since Cordelia is the instigator of both Kent’s and her disobedience, she is not only Eve, but also the serpent. Like Eve and the serpent for the Gnostics, she does no wrong. In the texts, the serpent is the divine feminine principle, the Epinoia, or after-thought, who instructs Eve. The Apocryphon of John says, "The Epinoia appeared as a light and she awakened their thinking" (Robinson 1988, 118). And the Hypostasis of the Archons: "The female spiritual principle came in the snake, the instructor" (164).
Shakespeare could not have read these texts: they were buried underground near Hag Hammadi, Egypt, until 1945. Yet he could have derived the basic ideas from a critical reading of Irenaeus’s “exposure” of the sects he says called themselves Gnostic. One is the “Ophites,” meaning “serpent worshipers.” They give the name “Ialdabaoth” to the lower-order creator-god, just as in the original texts we have been examining. In Irenaeus’s summary, he is considered arrogant, jealous, and “surrounded” by “forgetfulness” (Barnstone 1984, 662), i.e. ignorant of his origin.
As Iranaeus relates, Ialdabaoth is the eldest of seven rulers born of Lower Wisdom. They make a human being, but it has an inner power and luminescence that they lack. Ialdabaoth tries to pull that power out of Adam, and that is the creation of Eve. The rulers satisfy their “desire” on her, but Lower Wisdom has already taken the power out of Eve. Iranaeus continues:
But their mother, Sophia, planned to seduce Adam and Eve through a serpent, so that they would transgress the commandment of Ialdabaoth. Eve, hearing this word as if it came directly from the Son of God, readily believed it and persuaded Adam to eat from the tree from which Ialdabaoth had said not to eat. When they ate, they knew the power which is above all, and they departed from those who had made them. (Barnstone 1984, 662)This paraphrase is a good example of how Irenaeus colors his reportage with his own prejudices. Several Coptic texts have been found recounting the story of Sophia’s intervention in the garden, but none talks Sophia “seducing” Adam and Eve, or the advice coming “as if” from the Son of God. In one text, the Origin of the World, Christ actually does appear in the tree to speak to Eve. But Irenaeus does paraphrase correctly when he says that in these texts what Adam and Eve get from following the serpent’s advice is Gnosis of the Most High, a knowledge that even their own creators, Ialdabaoth and his crew, lack.
Another group of Gnostics makes the connection to Sophia even clearer. Irenaeus says,
Some assert that the serpent was Sophia herself; for this reason it was opposed to the maker of Adam and gave knowledge to men, and therefore is called the wisest of all. (Barnstone 1984, 664).The text in front of him is probably the Hypostasis of the Archons, from which I have already taken a similar quote. Calling the snake “the wisest of all” is a reference to Jesus’s saying, “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matt. 10:16). The implication is that the serpent, far from being evil, was honored by Jesus himself, just as the dove was honored as the symbol of the Holy Spirit. (Anyone wondering what orthodoxy made of that implication may consult the “Church Father” Epiphanius [1987, 247] for a rebuttal. According to him, Jesus obviously meant only that the serpent is wise because in coiling it protects its head, just as the faithful should protect their faith in Christ when preaching to unbelievers. What an image of Christian preachers! With refutations like this one, it is no wonder the Church Fathers decided just to burn such commentaries on scripture, rather than debate them.)
Then, as in Genesis, comes the expulsion from Paradise, and later the flood. In the Ophites’ telling of the story, according to Irenaeus, it is Sophia, the friend of humanity, who tells Noah to build the ark; Jehovah is bent on destroying his creation once and for all! Irenaeus’s purpose in telling all this is to expose the ones making up such stories as deceitful liars and scoundrels. Yet for one who values stories as stories, and not as historical truths, the Gnostic version puts an ironic twist on Genesis and its God. An attentive reader such as Shakespeare, who no doubt was not all that fond of being ordered and threatened by blustering, idiotic authorities himself, could, had his eyes fallen on these pages, hardly have missed a critique here of a certain personality type—today some call it “type A”; but in days gone by it was simply Jehovah, Lord of Hosts.
Moreover the exact story that Irenaeus is criticizing occurs in the Old Testament text Wisdom of Solomon, in a passage (10:4) in which Sophia, God’s Wisdom, is shown saving the day after Jehovah initiates actions that could destroy his chosen species once and for all:
For whose cause [that of the unrighteous Cain] the earth being drowned with the flood, wisdom again preserved it, and directed the course of the righteous in a piece of wood of small value.For the referent of “whose” in the above, I cite Glicksman in Wisdom of Solomon 10 (p. 113, in Google Books):
It seems that, for pseudo-Solomon, the cycle of sin that leads to the Flood really begins with the first murderer.Since Jehovah is the one who brought on the Flood, it is Sophia who saves not only humanity but all the animals from being destroyed by Jehovah’s wrath. Irenaeus may not have approved of Wisdom of Solomon; the text was excluded from the Vulgate. But it was an integral part of the Protestant Bible in England, not only the King James but the Geneva Bible and Bishop’s Bible that preceded it.
In the play, we get the critique of this Jehovah-personality-type not only in Lear, but also in the other old authoritarian in the story, Lear’s friend Gloucester. He, too, has good and bad offspring, in his case two sons, and is fooled by the bad Edmund while rejecting and persecuting the good Edgar. In his case the bad one is exceptionally devilish, and Gloucester trusts his offspring. Once taken in, he too, is savagely ruthless. When Edmund fools his father into thinking that Edgar wounded him when he tried to apprehend Edgar, the father says, “Bring the murderous coward to the stake [Foakes’ note: place of execution]:/ He that conceals him, death!” (II.i.61-62). Gloucester, too, in the end comes to recognize his error, although not until Edmund’s friends have put out his eyes: “I stumbled when I saw,” (IV.i.21) he laments.
Shakespeare’s device of the good and bad offspring occurs occasionally in Genesis, as with Cain and Abel. It is one the Gnostics use extensively. In the Ophite myth, according to Irenaeus, Ialdabaoth looked down upon the mire of material substance and with it bore a son, a kind of twisted spirit, who in turn begot seven evil spirits. This description corresponds somewhat to Gloucester’s begetting of his bastard Edmund, out of wedlock yet “saucily” (I.i.20), i.e. with lust. For the Ophites, the good son is Jesus, born of the Virgin and begotten by Ialdabaoth, unwittingly acting in accord with Sophia’s plan. The Christ then descends upon Jesus at the baptism. Christ the son of the highest God, and Jesus son of Ialdabaoth, merge at the baptism. This son, of course, corresponds to Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son. Just as Ialdabaoth, through the Jewish Saducees, persecutes Jesus, so does Gloucester, deceived by Edmund, go after Edgar, who at first is gullible like his father but later learns from his experience.
Other Gnostic myths have variations on this theme. Irenaeus summarizes the myth told by Ptolemaeus, a follower of the arch-heretic Valentinus. In this myth the Highest God begets the good Sophia, Sophia begets the so-so demiurge, and the demiurge begets Satan. For another example, in Hypostasis of the Archons, the demiurge himself is the bad son, engendered by the good Sophia, while the good son is Sabaoth, engendered by Ialdabaoth.
The ultimate fate of Ialdabaoth, or the demiurge, likewise varies. The variations correspond to the variety of outcomes for the personality-type. In Hypostasis of the Archons, Yaldabaoth is “thrown down to Tartarus” (Robinson 1988, 158) by Sophia, who raises his son Sabaoth to the seventh heaven. In Ptolemaeus, when the demiurge hears the Savior he receives him gladly, even if still without knowledge of the higher realm. For the Ophites, after the resurrection Ialdabaoth stops persecuting Jesus, and after the ascension sets him at his right hand. There Jesus receives souls; he takes those with gnosis to himself and gives those with faith and good works to Ialdabaoth. It is not clear exactly what happened between the crucifixion and the resurrection to change Ialdabaoth’s mind. We shall see the process of enlightenment is in later sections of this essay, using other Gnostic sources as a guide and Lear and Gloucester as examples.
The texts found in Egypt add feeling to Irenaeus’s rather lifeless summaries. One of the most poetic is the Gospel of Truth, in which the creator god is called “Error.” (Oddly, the word takes a feminine pronoun; perhaps that is only because it is a feminine noun in Greek, plane. Its characterization fits the normally masculine demiurge far better than it does Sophia, the only feminine candidate. The English translator uses the neutral “it.”):
Ignorance of the Father brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see. For this reason Error became powerful; it worked on its own matter foolishly, not having known the truth. It set about with a creation, preparing in power and beauty the substitute for the truth….Jesus, the Christ, enlightened those who were in darkness through oblivion...For this reason Error grew angry at him, persecuted him, was distressed at him and was brought to naught. (Robinson 1988, 40-41)"Father" is the Gnostic highest god, a particle of whose light lies hidden in the souls of humans. "Ignorance" is the condition of the spiritual world before the creation, whose beings lack knowledge of the Father, one of whom, in the version of the myth attributed to Ptolemaeus by Irenaeus, searches for the father but only experiences anguish, fear, and perplexity. It may be that Ignorance is just another name for Sophia (Quispel 2000b, 240). Ignorance brings about anguish, which solidifies, i.e. becomes material. Ignorance also brings about Error, the demiurge, who "works on its own matter foolishly"—or so the myth describes the forming of our universe.
In the play, we see the anguish first in those whom Lear ignorantly and terrifyingly persecutes, Cordelia and Kent. Then Lear's older daughters inflict the terror on Lear, one that expands to include others: after Lear, there is the Fool, and after him. Gloucester; even Cordelia near the end is not exempt from anguish and terror. As though with the Gospel of Truth's imagery in mind, in Olivier's film of the play a thick fog blankets the land after Lear leaves Goneril to visit Regan.
Error’s triumph is the creation, “preparing in power and beauty the substitute for the truth.” The beauty of the created world is not in question; what is in question is its goodness and its creation by the highest god. However beautiful, it is grossly imperfect, a world whose creatures live by killing one another. Similarly human rulers sometimes sponsor great art projects to cover up their uglier deeds (e.g. Athens in its war against Sparta, Rome during the Empire). But that is simply part of the deceit, not something that speaks in his favor.
Error's being "brought to naught" is like the fate of Ialdabaoth in Hypostasis of the Archons, who is said not to have repented of his arrogance and was therefore sent to Tartarus, like the Christian Satan. The Gospel of Truth adds, "They were nothing, the anguish and the terror and the creature of deceit," meaning Error; therefore "Despise Error." Error prepared "works and oblivions and terrors, in order that by means of those it might entice those of the middle and capture them" (all Robinson 1988, 40). The "middle" here is the place of souls lacking gnosis but still wanting salvation--souls called psychica (ensouled) in some texts (Attridge 1985, Vol. 2, 46). By such means the demiurge hopes to keep these souls from attaining knowledge, and so trap them in its realm.
Later in the Gospel of Truth, Error sounds even more like the Devil: "When knowledge drew near it--this is the downfall of (Error) and all its emanations [i.e. spirits it produced]--Error is empty, having nothing inside" (44). In such a state, presumably, it loses its allure. This is the fate of a Satanic demiurge, a false god unwilling to admit its deceptions and self-deceptions.
What corresponds in the play to Error’s downfall is not Lear's end but rather that of his older daughters and Gloucester’s son Edmund. Edgar defeats Edmund in single combat and presents evidence of his crimes. At the same time, Edgar confronts Goneril in front of her husband with letters Regan and she have written to Edmund. The dying Edmund admits his crimes and even adds, “Some good I mean to do” (V.iii.241)—he wants to cancel his order to have Lear and Cordelia murdered. As for Goneril, she kills her sister Regan and then herself. Even they are victims. One Valentinian text, the Tripartite Tractate, gives an apt and quite modern name for what has seduced them: "lust for power" (Robinson 1988, 84f).
But their dying is not the important thing, for the same happens to Lear and Cordelia. What matters is the exposure of their "emptiness," thus neutralizing their ability to "entice" those in the middle—for example Goneril's husband and the rest of the British army, who thought they were fighting off a French invasion, not supporting a coup d’etat. This emptiness is something the evil characters do not recognize in themselves until it is too late: instead, they dream of power and glory, and see others' anguish and terror as a means to that end.
Lear early on loses his illusions of power; he is forced to face the anguish head on. In this he represents the demiurge with another outcome, in a variant told in many Gnostic texts. Like Lear, the demiurge in such texts is a ruler “not inclined to evil” (Robinson 1988, 88) but unfortunately influenced by “lust for power” (84).
There is much about Error that is reminiscent of the play's emphasis on the word "nothing." The anguish, terror, and fear of oblivion are "nothing"; they are products of ignorance and deceit. Error is "empty"; inside it is "nothing." Its place of origin, in The Origin of the World, is shadow and the abyss. This nothing is still very much something, but a something whose home appears to be below everything, as opposed to the nothing that is above everything, the fullness.
All of this shows the play’s undeniable moral thrust, hardly nihilistic in its vision. Lear and Gloucester, the foolish old men, take a different path, one which again Gnostic myth expresses well. The Gnostic teacher Basilides, in an account unknown until the mid-19th century, probably comes the closest to expressing the demiurge’s outcome in terms similar to Lear’s. We shall see in the next section that the essence of this account continued in the alchemists, one place Shakespeare could have found it.
Basilides, like many other Gnostics, calls the demiurge “the Seven,” which could mean either the seventh planet, Saturn, which rules the rest, or a power beyond Saturn that rules all seven planets. Since the Jews worshiped on Saturday, the Graeco-Roman world in which Basilides lived tended to identify Jehovah with Saturn. Saturn is the Graeco-Roman sky-god so consumed with fear of being overthrown that he devours all his children, missing only Jupiter, who does later overthrow him. In Rome the overthrow of the old year by the new, the hunched-up old man by the babe, was celebrated in the Saturnalia. Similarly, for Gnostics, the Christ child replaced the tribal god Jehovah. We can see in Lear some of the characteristics, often associated with old age, that even today are called "saturnine": a melancholy bitterness, rage toward those who will not cater to one, and an ironic sense of humor, which the Fool appeals to. In Roman myth, the deposed Saturn was in charge of the Elysian Fields, where dead war heroes went. Lear's insistence on his hundred knights might be his attempt to play that role. We shall see in the next section how seeing Lear as Saturn allows us to find Lear's process in certain alchemical works.
In Basilides’ myth, however, the demiurge is not overthrown; he gets a new perspective. Basilides describes the conversion of the demiurge in terms quite reminiscent of our play. Let me first explain Basilides' conception of the highest god, “the God of all.” Basilides calls it the "nonexistent god," so removed from our world that it cannot be described in words. One can truly say neither that it exists nor that it does not exist; it is the No-thing beyond everything that brings about further No-things (to use Lear’s phrase), its ineffable Sonships, as well as the created world. And although it never acts in the world, what happens there is in accord with its plan, for good and for ill. Thus a demiurge emerges, actually two of them, one called “the Eight” to rule the stars and the other to rule the planets. Although the demiurges each think initially that they are the god of all, the sons teach them otherwise:
The Archon [ruler] learned that he was not the God of all but had been begotten...He was converted and was afraid, recognizing his previous state of ignorance...For he began to be wise, instructed by the Christ who sat by him...After being instructed, taught, and made to fear, the Archon made a confession of the sin which he had committed by magnifying himself. (Barnstone 1984, 632-633)
To the extent that this myth describes the transformation of an individual human being's view of ego, Self, and world, Lear's awakening from his habit of deifying himself corresponds to just such an event, as he becomes humbled by his elder daughters and the storm.
Basilides mentions a Christ, but it is a Christ in the heavens, rather like the “preexistent Logos” in the Gospel of John. Basilides’ heavenly Christ is the model for the one on earth, whom he calls "Jesus the son of Mary," who "was illuminated and set on fire by the light which shone upon him"--apparently while still in the womb, for the light goes “as far as Mary” (Barnstone 1984, 633). Jesus then gathers the "Sonship"--"seeds" (630) of the non-existent god within matter--around him, which "ascends above after being purified" (633).
We shall discuss this "purification," as alchemy applied it to humanity, in the next section. For now I wish to ask, Who is Lear's instructor, corresponding to Basilides' Christ? There does not have to be one, of course: we are using Gnostic texts piecemeal to illuminate the play; there is no allegory tying each element of the play to an element of a Gnostic myth. Yet much has been written about Christ-figures in Lear, in the sense of instructors and redeemers.
Suggestions of Christ occur by way of Biblical allusions to the Christ of the canonical Gospels. Shaheen (1988) summarizes many of the references. First, at least three allusions to Christ occur in descriptions of Cordelia, thus suggesting Cordelia as Christ-like redeemer of her father. There is the King of France's homage to her when he asks her to be his wife, without dowry or father's blessing. France addresses her: "Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor/ Most choice forsaken and most loved despised" (I.i.250-251). These words echo Paul's descriptions of Christ , e.g. "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor" (II Cor. 8:9), and Isaiah’s words then taken as prophecies of Christ: “We desired him, despised as he was and the least of men.” (Is.53:2-3). Erasmus had called attention to these antithetical descriptions in a much-reprinted essay, “Sileni Alcibiadis” (1992, 264; Gatti, 1989, sees another part of this essay reflected in Hamlet, a part we will consider in Section 8). Second, there is Cordelia herself, echoing Christ's own words at Luke 2:49: "O dear father,/It is thy business that I go about" (IV.iv.23-24). Third. there is her Gentleman's comment looking at the mad Lear running from her soldiers at Dover:
Gentleman. ...Thou hast one daughterHere "twain" is Adam and Eve, and the "general curse" Jehovah's response to their disobedience.
Who redeems nature from the general curse
Which twain [the two] have brought her to. (IV.vi.201-203)
Cordelia also is the character whose devotion to truth, her refusal to flatter, starts Lear off on the path toward a truer and more humble understanding. I would suggest, however, that the way of Lear's redemption is not by way of the traditional Christ, who asked that people believe on him and be saved, and who suffered and died for them, but by way of the demiurge's repentance in Basilides' account--by self-knowledge, a humbling recognition of his faults. Certainly by the end, in the presence of Cordelia herself, come to save him from her sisters' wrath, he is all regret:
Lear. If you have poison for me, I will drink it.And a few lines later:
I know you do not love me. For your sisters,
Have, as I remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause, they do not. (V.v.78-81)
Lear. ...Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish. (I.v.83-84)He lays himself on her mercy.
Yet despite all the suggestions that Cordelia is Lear's redeemer, it must be said that Lear is led to his awakening not just by Cordelia, but others as well, especially Kent, the Fool, Gloucester, and Edgar. They all carry certain role-modeling aspects for Lear's transformation. On the other hand, the negative characters, such as his elder daughters, also have a positive effect, by their shattering of his faith in them. He has an impersonal teacher as well, namely nature, which seems to mirror and intensify his moods, in the storm and the peaceful morning afterwards. His suffering, his own imitation of Christ, also plays its part, as we shall see later. Arrogance apparently needs suffering before it can listen to those who can teach it something important.
Edgar in particular has his own references comparing him to Christ, as we shall see in the section after next. I wish to emphasize that the correspondences are to a Gnostic version of Christ as opposed to the orthodox one. With the orthodox Christ, it would be hard to see how more than one character could symbolize Christ: that Christ, after all, is a unique individual whose unique sacrifice redeems all humanity (Roland Frye, 1963, 1961, makes this point, against those who see the play as a Christian allegory). In Gnosticism, as we shall see in section 5, what matters is the expression of a certain role, one modeling suffering, compassion, self-knowledge, and a certain way of being that is beyond suffering, which we shall examine at the end of this essay. Gnostics see Christ as the archetypal fulfillment of this role and way of being. Whether such a figure actually existed in history is then quite irrelevant: it is the image that matters.
The point about what or who brings about redemption, in the sense of self-knowledge, could be put more psychologically. What can change the narcissistic Lear, who demands unswerving and exclusive love from all? Such a narcissist is highly resistant to change, as long as he holds the power to get what he wants. He must fail in order to change, and begin to feel what Jung called a humbling of the ego. The ones who redeem him are precisely those who disappoint him and make him suffer: In Lear's case, it is first those whom he perceives as insulting him, Cordelia and Kent, but who also matter to him. Later his teachers are those who renege on their bargains, Goneril and Regan. These latter, unfortunately, have such an overwhelming feeling of having been wounded by him that they cannot show compassion for him; so he suffers in the storm and even more at the end of the play. Yet he has been just like those daughters himself, in his pitiless treatment of Cordelia and Kent and probably of the daughters themselves. As the Fool has said, in a witticism that is worth repeating:
Fool. I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true, thou'lt have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. (I.iv.174-176)Lear also has within himself the potential, we shall soon see, to be like his youngest daughter, who does have compassion. In this teaching, he is led by several other compassionates: Kent, in his act of secretly joining Lear; the Fool; finally Edgar and Gloucester. All function as split-off parts of himself, which he wards off, defends against, and finally integrates in his transformation.
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