Figures of Fidelity: Believing in "King Lear"

Abstract

This article explores how the female of King Lear address the nature of Reformation believing. By figures I mean both the characters and tropes of female identity. By I mean the experience of inhabiting and being inhabited by some idea concerning the world, the otherworld, or another person. I seek, in effect, to use this play to probe an analogy and a complicity between faith in affective objects and spiritual ones: Why and how do convictions concerning erotic objects resemble those concerning salvation? More to the point, how does the anxiety attendant upon a Calvinist God play itself out in the plane of social knowledge, and why does the failure of faith in the reciprocity of human love comport itself much like soteriological crisis? More generally, why do these two experiences share in the literature of this period a vocabulary, affect, and evidentiary structure? And what does that resemblance tell us about not what, but how, believing occurs in this moment: What kind of an activity is it? What are its objects, subjects, habits, and representations? Much of our recent investigation into early modern thought has concerned itself with what people believed (the Elizabethan world picture? witches? monarchy? liberalism?). Such inquiries have been chiefly concerned with political identities and beliefs conceived of as a matter of dissent or assent. A Renaissance subject in such work is, example, either for social order or against it, contained by it or subversive to it (usually the former). Histories of Reformation religious identities often operate along similar lines, asking, example, was Christopher Marlowe an atheist, or was Shakespeare a Catholic? Such investigation first identifies a thinkable thought and then searches the thinker, via his text, signs of its presence, which tends to be imagined as an