A Tale of Two Jobs

Chapter 3 addresses the Old Testament figure of Job. It considers the resonance of his biblical narrative amid a climate of religious persecution in Europe. Job’s narrative was typically understood to mark bodily suffering as a test of faith and, for many readers, affirmed that their suffering, like Job’s, was divinely authorized for a finite period of time. A wave of theological and literary writings affirm the remarkable impact of the Joban trajectory of suffering in early modern culture. Shakespeare’s King Lear is no exception. Yet, instead of upholding the Joban paradigm of eventual restoration—a feature of the anonymous source play, King Leir—Shakespeare’s play is notable for its deliberate disruption of the typological process of promise and fulfilment. In fact, this play offers a shocking inversion of established exegetical traditions of suffering more generally.