Pagan Beliefs in the Serpent's Tooth‪.‬

THE YEAR 1991 WAS A GOOD TIME for works inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear. Most readers have heard of, or read, or seen the movie of, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres--after all, her novel won the 1992 Pultizer Prize for fiction. But another version of the legend also appeared in 1991: Diana L. Paxson's The Serpent's Tooth, which was not a modern adaptation, like Smiley's, but an attempt to recreate the original King Lear story. Paxson sets her novel in the fifth century B.C., in a Britain conquered by the Celtic Leir (Paxson follows Geoffrey of Monmouth's spelling) but with a population made up mainly of a matrilineal people predating the Celts. The immediately preceding people, whom Leir has conquered, are in Paxson's treatment the Hamitic group who moved up from North Africa through Spain. Further back, remaining only in the moors, are a stone-age people. Of course, these terms are not used in the novel itself--for example, the Hamitic group is referred to as the Painted People (22)--but Paxson in her "Afterword" indicates that this intellectual framework underlies the novel (395-97). (The Hamitic tribes seem to have been a bronze-age culture before they were conquered, since Leir has to use a bronze knife to sacrifice a bull in their rites [26].) I have said that Paxson's novel is inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear, but that is oversimplifying what she is doing. Her book could be considered as much a retelling of Geoffrey of Monmouth's account in his Historia Regum Britanniae, Shakespeare's source, as of Shakespeare's play itself. Therefore, in this essay, I want to consider two topics. First, the essay will discuss Paxson's adaptation of Shakespeare's work. Second, growing out of that, the essay will discuss Paxson's development of the pagan aspect of the setting. Students of Shakespeare will remember that he depicted the pre-Christian setting by the use of the names of the Roman gods. The names of the Celtic gods, even if they had been available to him, would not have been familiar to his audience. One modern production of King Lear, starring Laurence Oliver as Lear and Diana Rigg as Regan, emphasized its temporal setting with an opening in a small-scale Stonehenge, holding Lear's court, with the actors dressed mostly in furs (Elliott). Paxson uses a few Celtic names of deities--e.g., Lugus (34), Dana (124), Briga (134)--but most of her references are more general--"The blessing of earthmother is thine" (45) and, at a spring, "Lady of life, from the depths of earth upwelling, [...] [h]elp me, my Mother!" (275). Presumably these goddesses are different aspects of a Mother Goddess, but if they were named, they would be as different as Gaia and Arethusa, to use Greek examples.