Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

140William ShakespeareNevertheless, when everything has been said that can be saidto make the world intelligible, when we have striven our utmost torealize all the possible good that exists in the world, a need of fortituderemains.It is worthy of note that each of the principal personages ofthe play is brought into presence of those mysterious powers whichdominate life and preside over human destiny; and each, accordingto his character, is made to offer an interpretation of the great riddle.Of these interpretations, none is adequate to account for all the facts.Shakspere (differing in this from the old play) placed the story inheathen times, partly, we may surmise, that he might be able to putthe question boldly, “What are the gods?” Edmund, as we have seen,discovers no power or authority higher than the will of the individualand a hard trenchant intellect. In the opening of the play he utters hisironical appeal:“I grow; I prosper—Now gods stand up for bastards.” 12It is not until he is mortally wounded, with his brother standing overhim, that the recognition of a moral law forces itself painfully upon hisconsciousness, and he makes his bitter confession of faith:“The wheel is come full circle, I am here.”His self-indulgent father is, after the manner of the self-indulgent,prone to superstition; and Gloucester’s superstition affords somecountenance to Edmund’s scepticism. “This is the excellent fopperyof the world, that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeitof our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, themoon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity; fools byheavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by sphericalpredominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedienceof planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divinethrusting-on.”Edgar, on the contrary, the champion of right, ever ac tive inopposing evil and advancing the good cause, discovers that the godsare upon the side of right, are unceasingly at work in the vindicationof truth and the execution of justice. His faith lives through trial and