SOURCE: Fortin, René E. “Hermeneutical Circularity and Christian Interpretations of King Lear.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 113-25.

In the essay below, Fortin asserts that a Christian reading of King Lear is as compatible with the “facts” of the play as a secular one, but that neither one is authoritative. Noting that the death of Cordelia is the principal impediment for Christian interpreters, he suggests that the play's ending, far from contradicting Christian doctrine, confirms the Catholic and Protestant notion of God's judgments as unknown and inexplicable.

Attempts to redeem King Lear by appealing to intimations of Christian transcendence in the play have been summarily, if not vehemently, dismissed by secular critics. Christian critics, we are told by W. R. Elton and others, are simply wrong because they do not attend to the “facts” of the play; seeking to escape the dire significances of the tragic vision, they are in effect...