ABSTRACT
King Lear has been interpreted as an atheist manifesto, the work of a religious skeptical, and a pastiche of providential expectations. This chapter argues that the difficult tragedy bears marks of a theo-poesis, a human mediation of gods, both cruel and kind. Thomas Aquinas’s account of providence as enabling a sphere of mundane causality helps to recast the play as one in which the divine agency is not fully absent, even if the play itself is dominated by the threat of and maneuvers against imminent civil war. While no boundless infinite is ever invited on stage, the laments of Gloucester, the violence of Cornwall, and the loyalties of Edgar and Cordelia demonstrate a mundane excess, an energy of humans that, even as it exists within its own boundaries, gestures to a kind of charged cosmos. There are thus expectations and manifestations throughout of a non-competitive transcendence at work in the affairs of family and state.
