In an excerpt from his new book, The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe, which connects the Bard to the emerging worldview of the Scientific Revolution, Dan Falk claims that “just as his works hint at the beginnings of science, so, too, do they hint at the possibility of unbelief.” The evidence he finds for this in King Lear:
In this most somber of Shakespeare’s plays, the gods are often called upon—by the king and Gloucester and others—but they do not respond. In their absence, justice cannot be guaranteed; indeed, it becomes fragile in the extreme. Lear, in desperation, hopes that events will “show the heavens more just,” but it is a lost cause. The play ends, as William Elton puts it, “with the death of the good at the hands of the evil.” In one of the play’s most famous—and darkest—lines, Gloucester laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods/ They kill us for their sport.” …
In King Lear and the Gods, Elton presents a kind of checklist of what makes a “Renaissance skeptic”—denying divine providence, denying the immortality of the soul, placing mankind among the beasts, denying God’s role as creator of the universe, attributing to nature what is properly the work of God—and then shows that Lear, over the course of the play, develops into precisely such a skeptic. It is a gradual process, but it is relentless: “Lear’s disillusionment, once begun, sweeps all before it, toppling the analogical edifices of God and man, divine and human justice.” As [Shakespeare scholar Eric] Mallin put it in our interview, King Lear is “essentially a godless document”; it describes a world “emptied of divinity.”
Previous Dish on Shakespeare and religion here. Our round-up celebrating the anniversary of his birth here.
(Video: The Royal Shakespeare Company performs Act 5, Scene 3 of King Lear)
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