Speculating on mysteries: religion and politics in King Lear

In a play about a pagan king and a mismanaged kingdom, where immorality, betrayal, civil strife and expectation of foreign intervention were omnipresent and the political landscape was beset by intrigue and domestic and foreign spies, Shakespeare created a surrogate for sixteenth and seventeenth century England. King Lear deals with theological ‘mysteries’ and doctrinal disputes and their political implications. Shakespeare exploits the fused religious and sexual language that was a tool in the deadly disputes, daringly conflating the sacrilegious and the religious: cannibalism is shorthand for the mystery of the Eucharist, and astrology, for divine influence. The pivotal speech of Act V, sc. iii, 9–20, alludes metaphorically to the profound religious and political issues of the Catholic–Protestant controversy; for example, King Lear takes upon himself ‘the mystery of things’ in his role as one of ‘God's spies’, in which we hear, also, ‘God's (s)pies’ or magpies, whose black and white plumage led to their being a frequent contemporary mockery of bishops in their black and white garb. Such crucial phrases and the punning changes Shakespeare rings on them lead to the core of the play and the divine denouement to come. Man's – and woman's – passing judgement on their fellows, presumptuous playing at God, and pretensions to the mantle of Christ are treated with a religious irony and irreverent levity in proportion to the moral falseness and religious and political bigotry of the times.