Page 40 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION xxxv
freedom from emotion, the disease of the intellect, which
produces true stoic content. On the contrary Lear finds
his peace in an active emotion—in all-absorbing love. That
it is which at last renders him independent of circumstance.

One may be tempted to wonder whether Professor
Campbell need have brought in Stoicism at all. Pro-
1
fessor John F. Danby suggests that 'what has often been
taken for Stoicism in Shakespeare is not Stoicism at all
but rather the orthodox teaching on Christian Patience'.
Stoic patience is, as Professor Danby states, 'an impassive
withstanding of all that conflicts with Reason. At best it
is indifference, at worst unfeelingness.' Christian
patience is 'based on faith and suffering charity. It
expresses the sum of the Christian virtues. Its supreme
example is the activity of Christ dying on the Cross.'
Stoic patience eliminates feeling; Christian patience
essentially involves feeling. At the end of the play the
regenerated Lear has not become impervious to feeling;
on the contrary he has become capable of a self-abnega-
tion which springs from an awareness of what love and
charity really are.
As, under his grievous afflictions, Lear learns how to
be patient, he learns other lessons too. And from time to
time Shakespeare—surely deliberately—reminds us of
Christian truth. Coming to realize how terribly wrong
he had been in his past life, Lear is able to say, at 4.6.96 ff.
They flattered me like a dog, and told me I had the white
hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say 'ay'
and 'no' to everything that I said! 'Ay,' and 'no' too,
was no good divinity.
It was not good theology, because—I quote Professor
Muir's note—'it went against the biblical injunction,
James, ch. v, verse 12: "But let your yea be yea; and
1
See his article 'King Lear and Christian Patience' in
The Cambridge Journal, 1, no. 5 (February 1948), 305-20.