SOURCE: Guilfoyle, Cherrell. “The Redemption of King Lear.” In Shakespeare's Play within Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, pp. 111-27. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University Medieval Institute Publications, 1990.

In the following essay, Guilfoyle examines the theme of Christian redemption in King Lear and contends that several figures in the play assume Christ-like qualities.

The title of this paper is a quotation from A. C. Bradley's lecture on King Lear: “Should we,” he asked, call “this poem The Redemption of King Lear?”¹ Bradley was not alone in detecting an underlying thread of Christian imagery in a play which Shakespeare, working largely from a Christian version of the old story, seemed resolute to express in overtly pagan terms. J. C. Maxwell wrote: “King Lear is a Christian play about a pagan world.”²

Shakespeare's principal source, The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his...