Act 4 transitions from wrath to grace. If the play ended with scene seven, it would be a comedy.
Gloucester recognizes his sins: “I stumbled when I saw.” He adds, “O dear son Edgar, The food of thy abused father’s wrath, / Might I live to see thee in my touch, / I’d say I had eyes again.” Though Gloucester’s condition is worse than Lear’s, his response to misfortune is far humbler.
Gloucester’s humility verges on despair. He believes in the gods but imagines they are sadistic: “They kill us for their sport.”
The following two scenes contain different beliefs about the gods. Albany asks for the gods to intervene, or else “Humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep.” In contrast, Kent sees human behavior determined by fate: “It is the stars / The stars above us, govern our conditions.” Neither view matches Gloucester’s.
Cordelia sounds like Christ in scene four when she says, “O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about!” Unfortunately, Lear is not a god.
In two different scenes, Goneril and Regan spar for Edmund’s affections. Unlike their contest for Lear’s inheritance, their battle for Edmund is a zero-sum contest. Only one can win.
Edgar manufactures a miracle for his father, then commands him to “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.” Edgar’s trial accesses grace through wrath: “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it.”
Lear enters the scene and offers steely political insight and graphic misogynist rhetoric. He says, “Nature’s above art in that respect.” He means that authentic royalty is superior to artificial royalty. Nevertheless, Lear uses figurative language throughout his diatribes. Most famously, he says, “We cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.”
Cordelia again gets linked with Christ when a gentleman says to Lear, “Thou hast a daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse.”
Cordelia prays for grace in scene seven: “O you kind gods, / Cure this great breach in his abused nature.”Lear asks for grace: “Pray you now, forget and forgive.”
Experiments in Criticism 