Abstract
Nearly every puzzle in the plot and text of the play-from Lear's initial motivation in issuing the love-test at the beginning, to the number and destination of the letter(s) sent by Lear by way of Kent to his daughter Regan, to the disappearance of the Fool after Act 3, Scene 6, to Edgar's delay in revealing himself to his blinded father Gloucester in the fourth act, to Edmund's delay in recalling his writ of execution against Cordelia-receives intelligent and provocative commentary. [...]even when Story Brown makes a connection between the play and the writings of Aquinas or Augustine, the point is quickly swallowed back into the progressing commentary, and is not developed in a persuasive way. Whereas several of the most helpful Christian contextualizations of King Lear over the past three decades-such as Judy Kronenfeld's King Lear and the Naked Truth and Joseph Wittreich's Image of that Horror-develop correspondences between lexical and conceptual foci in the play and contemporary religious discourses in England involving clothing and nakedness or the Book of the Apocalypse, Shakespeare's Philosopher King adopts a much longer historical view; in this commentary Shakespeare's interlocutors are neither the figures of the Reformation (radical or otherwise), nor English prelates or royalty, but Augustine, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon-whose theory of optics is placed by Story Brown in fascinating relation with King Lear's investigations into sight and blindness. 4. [...]even assuming the validity of Story Brown's interpretation of Edgar as "intellectus" (and more generally as the "Philosopher King"), we are left wondering how, exactly, this identification matches up with the dust jacket's synopsis of the book's argument.