SOURCE: Edwards, Michael. “King Lear and Christendom.” Christianity & Literature 50, no. 1 (autumn 2000): 15-29.

In the following essay, Edwards disagrees with critics who view King Lear as an expression of a godless existence, contending that the play is “an eminently Christian work” that dramatizes human imperfection and the possibility of redemption.

I

Christians are well placed to know that reading, like writing, is never innocent. How we understand a literary work reveals what we think literature to be (why it exists, what it is doing in the world); it also reveals how we conceive of Christianity. The way successive generations approach particular works and reflect in general on literary practice and theory offers more than a study in cultural history. The variety of opinion shows how important it is to think hard about the basic questions, and especially about what kind of world we believe we are living in.

Consider...