SOURCE: Davidson, Clifford. “The Iconography of Wisdom and Folly in King Lear.” In Shakespeare and the Emblem: Studies in Renaissance Iconography and Iconology, edited by Tibor Fabiny, pp. 189-214. Szeged, Hungary: Department of English, Attila Jozsef University, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Davidson calls attention to the way symbolic associations underscore the motif of reversals and inversions of order in King Lear. He argues that although the first four acts may be read as a traditional Christian presentation of the operation of divine providence, the iconography of Act V appears to question the wisdom of relying on moral or religious certainties.

Sometimes individual plays in the Shakespeare canon take on particularly strong significance in the light of events which we see taking place in the world around us. While it is unwise to see Shakespeare as a great sage, comparable perhaps to Socrates, the immediacy of some events in...