“And Thou, all-Shaking Thunder…”A Theological Notation to Lines 1–38 of King Lear, Act III, Scene II

Abstract

In the dramas of Shakespeare, the madman and the fool speak in prose; wisdom and sanity are properly poeticised. King Lear is no exception: I go some way in providing a theological notation to a crucial moment of Lear’s descent into madness, the fracturing of his blank verse into prose. Is the storm on the heath a representation of the turmoil of his mind? Or is it a theophany, the manifestation of divine displeasure at human foolishness? Finding between the verse and the prose the theological tradition of Christianity will allow us to negotiate this question and to understand a little more clearly the peculiar wisdom of poetry for Christianity.