Abstract:In the dramas of Shakespeare, the madman and the fool speak in prose; wisdom and sanity are properly poeticised. King Lear is no exception: I go some way in providing a theological notation to a crucial moment of Lear's descent into madness, the fracturing of his blank verse into prose. Is the storm on the heath a representation of the turmoil of his mind? Or is it a theophany, the manifestation of divine displeasure at human foolishness? Finding between the verse and the prose the theological tradition of Christianity will allow us to negotiate this question and to understand a little more clearly the peculiar wisdom of poetry for Christianity. -said Lear, the King, halfway down the road to madness; a road tragically of his own making. With these words, we find him wandering in a coverless heath, in the dark, unprotected from the elements, in the midst of a terrible storm. The rage of the elements mirrors the internal derangement of his mind. Lear will finally take the advice of his last companions and escape the storm, just as the stormy trial of his life, beyond its nadir, finally turns him from madness to the peculiar clarity of despair. Madness is not the end for Lear, though this is no comedy: Lear dies of grief with his full wits about him, after killing his would-be executioner, though not before his devoted daughter Cordelia is killed by him. His misfortunes begin with an ambiguous action: wanting to retire in old age from the duties of monarchy, Lear divides his kingdom between Goneril and Regan, his falsely flattering daughters, disinheriting Cordelia, who refuses to flatter him. In contrast to her sisters, she virtuously allows her love to be manifest in a lack of adequate speech. This event leads Lear down a dark path into loss and madness, even to the point of his own aphasia: "sa, sa, sa, sa," he babbles in response to the perceived inanity of the world in Act IV, Scene VI. This is, says an observer, "a sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch," but "Past speaking of in a king!" (lines 221-22). Cordelia's modest silence of love in Act I, Scene I (" . . . I am sure, my love's/more richer than my tongue," lines 80-81) finds its dark parallel in the mad silence of her father's raving. Between the time of his foolish act and the nadir of his madness, Lear is rendered homeless and destitute by Goneril and Regan, who confess to one another that they take him for a fool. He becomes a wandering solitary, except for the presence of his court fool and a devoted friend, the Earl of Kent, previously banished for expressing his indignation at Lear's actions, now disguised as a hired servant, Caius. It is before Caius/Kent enters the scene on the heath that Lear utters the words above in the presence of his court fool. In the following notation to III.2, 1-38, I will examine aspects of the Christian theological tradition in the Bard's dramatic construction. 2 I will argue that "between" verse and prose, the divine presence is signified, as, so to speak, an Absence that draws human passion and language ...
