References to religious
or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
it in their turn: Kent, for instance:
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our condition:
Edmund:
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound:
and again,
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we
make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
thrusting on:
Gloster:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport;
Edgar:
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
often repeated, of divine retribution.
Pages:
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382