What a Piece of Work

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Shakespeare is the supreme instance of a writer whose work embodies Christian theological patterns without being explicitly theological. His plays are organized around the great themes of the gospel — sin, suffering, repentance, forgiveness, grace, and the restoration of broken relationships — in ways that make them inexhaustible resources for TLA's project.

The Grammar of Grace

The late romances — The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Pericles, Cymbeline — are organized around a pattern that has no adequate secular name but that the Christian tradition calls grace: the restoration of what has been lost through sin and pride, accomplished not through the characters’ own efforts but through something that comes from outside them — through time, through the mercy of the wronged, through what the plays repeatedly call wonder and miracle. Hermione returns from apparent death. Prospero forgives his enemies. The lost children are found.

This pattern is the pattern of the gospel rendered in dramatic form, and it gives the romances their characteristic combination of pain and joy — the joy that comes not despite the suffering but through it, because the suffering is what makes the restoration possible. This is resurrection logic, and Shakespeare understood it instinctively even if he did not theologize it explicitly.

What King Lear Reveals

King Lear is the most theologically demanding of the tragedies because it refuses, more completely than any of the others, the consolations that tragedy normally provides. Cordelia dies. Lear dies holding her body. The universe offers no response. The survivors are left to “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

And yet the play is not nihilism. The love of Cordelia — the faithful, patient, costly love of the daughter who will not flatter, who returns from France to save a father who rejected her, who dies for him — is the most sustained portrait of agape in the secular literary tradition. Her love does not save Lear. But it witnesses, in the midst of the catastrophe, to the existence of a love that the catastrophe cannot extinguish. This witness is itself a theological act, whether Shakespeare intended it as such or not.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict that Shakespeare’s work maps across the entire range of human experience — in the political sphere of the history plays, in the domestic sphere of the comedies, in the spiritual sphere of the tragedies and romances. The seed of the serpent appears in the plays as Iago, as Edmund, as Macbeth’s ambition, as the flattery that corrupts Lear. The seed of the woman appears as Cordelia, as Prospero’s mercy, as the quality of mercy that Portia describes as the most godlike of human capacities.

Shakespeare did not write the literary apologetic. He wrote something better: the drama that the apologetic reads. His work is the archive that TLA explores, and every reading of it that attends to its deepest patterns discovers the same thing: a writer whose imagination was formed by the biblical vision of the human condition, and whose work remains inexhaustible because that vision is true.