SOURCE: “Accommodation and Synecdoche: Calvin's God in King Lear,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XX, 1988, pp. 147-68.

In the following essay, Keefer describes the means by which God is represented in the human terms of King Lear, observing Lear's actions as “a synecdochic parody of Calvinist predestination and grace.”

Deinde si maxime talis est deus ut nulla gratia, nulla hominum caritate teneatur, valeat. …

Cicero, De natura deorum, I.124

I

One striking feature of William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825) consists in his having made both God and his servant Job after the same image. Blake's engravings assert the identity of the two: Job has the same face as does that figure placed above him who, in Blake's subversive understanding of the text, represents the constricting selfhood that Job has made his God.¹ It may come as no surprise that the same pattern also appears in the polychrome...