SOURCE: Tippins, Darryl. “‘Can you make no use of nothing?’: Nihilism and Meaning in King Lear and The Madness of King George.” In Performance for a Lifetime, edited by Barbara C. Ewell and Mary A. McCay, pp. 159-80. New Orleans: Loyola University New Orleans, 1997.

In the following essay, Tippins offers a reading of King Lear that attempts to mediate between absurdist or pessimistic interpretations of the play and religious or redemptive ones.

At the heart of any dialogue is the conviction that what is exchanged has meaning. 

—Michael Holquist

And yet this nothing / is the seed of all—heaven's clear / eye, where all the world's wonders appear. 

—Wendell Berry

Fierce debates rage over the ultimate meaning and purpose of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, King Lear. On the one hand, the so-called “Idealists” (that is, the humanists and Christian readers) value the play as a story of redemptive suffering. A...