ou it is not so.'

I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question
presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that
excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and
overrules them? And in _King Lear_ this question is not left to us to
ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious
or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
it in their turn: Kent, for instance:

It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our condition:

Edmund:

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound:

and again,

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we
make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
thrusting on:

Gloster:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport;

Edgar:

Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.

Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm
seems the messenger of heaven:

Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes....

At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has
taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just;

and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV