The third post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity.
It’s a regular occurrence, especially among students who are overcommitted and socially invested. They request an extension for what they assure me is a really good reason.
One student can’t finish her paper on time because her roommate is in the hospital, and she had to spend all night there, keeping watch over her friend.
Another asks for a make-up quiz because his girlfriend was, in his words, “having a rough time” and “needed to talk.”
I once had a student provide documentation that the geriatric dog she was pet-sitting had died and she had to handle the logistics.
If we assume (perhaps sometimes too generously) that these stories are true, then the students are right: They do have a very good reason. And they are fairly confident that if they just explain the context clearly enough, then I—their kind, nurturing, female professor—will show mercy. Because if they “had to” or “needed to” do something else truly meaningful, then the academic impact should surely be mitigated.
These students are experiencing the tug of their vocational network, what Kathryn Kleinhans terms “multiple callings in multiple communities.” Their callings conflict with each other (to use Jason Mahn’s formulation), and they must make a choice about where and when to invest their energy. When they arrive at my office, they hope to bypass the tension this creates and assume I will help alleviate the pressure—but life rarely plays out so smoothly.
I start the conversation by affirming (when I can) that they made a wise, loving, responsible choice. They may indeed have made the right choice. But I then gently explain that the absence or delay still receives a grade deduction.
The disappointment and confusion on their faces suggest they’ve not had many opportunities to navigate vocational tension or, more likely, that they’ve been rescued from the consequences. These reasons have become part of my motivation for teaching King Lear.
This 400-year-old play by William Shakespeare doesn’t end like we think it should, with virtue rewarded. Instead, it illustrates the painful cost of doing the right thing. In this way, it’s a play with vocational implications.
One of Shakespeare’s longest plays, King Lear is mired in sadness and violence. Two characters graphically gouge out an old man’s eyes on stage. That same man, plagued by despair, attempts to throw himself from a cliff (again, depicted on stage). Rather than one villain, the play gives us several. By the end there’s a stack of bodies piled on the stage, representing a litany of death devices: poison, stabbing, swordfight, hanging, heartache. The ending is far from happy.
But when I ask students if the ending is dis-satisfying, they usually say no. They see a narrative logic to the play’s resolution. All the villains die, often in ways that reflect a sense of cosmic justice. (Villains killed by those they harmed; one evil sister poisoned by the other.) The protagonists Lear and Gloucester die of grief, not violence, which seems somehow fitting for flawed but teachable characters who own up to their lack of wisdom. The end is sad, yes, but not necessarily unjust.
That is, until we come to Cordelia.
Lear’s only loving and loyal daughter, Cordelia is the epitome of virtue under pressure. She rejects flattery and embraces honesty, for which Lear banishes her. But when she learns of the tragic turn things have taken, she returns to England with an army to rescue her father, punish her sisters, and restore the kingdom to order. She is the model of care and sacrifice, willing to lay down her life on behalf of a father who, by most accounts, doesn’t deserve her mercy.
At the end of the story, we expect Cordelia to survive. Surely this wholly good character—the one the play has explicitly invited us to see as a Christ-figure—will triumph. In fact, all of Shakespeare’s source texts suggest that she will. If he told the story as we would expect, she should ascend the throne and rule with virtue and justice, proof that goodness wins out in the end.
But this is decidedly not the story Shakespeare gives us. Cordelia dies a surprising and senseless death. This, my students readily note, is the most dissatisfying feature of the play. Even if evil isn’t always punished, shouldn’t goodness be rewarded?
As educators, if we’re being honest, don’t we (like our students) bring this same expectation to our vocations? We want our right choices to be met with affirmation and ease. We want our multiple callings to align in a tension-free matrix of balance and integration.
But the opposite is often true. Our callings interfere with each other. Doing the right thing—the very thing we’re called to—can be exceedingly costly.
This is precisely what Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore explores in Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling. While our vocational matrix can be good and satisfying, it can also be double-edged, painful, sad. But that doesn’t necessarily make it tragic. It is, as Miller-McLemore writes, “a necessary and even good part of calling, something that can enhance life precisely through its hardship, duty, and even sacrifice and suffering.”
Cordelia says something similar: “We are not the first / Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.” Vocational tension is to be expected; the right path will come with resistance.
As students wrestle with the ending of King Lear, they learn to navigate vocational tensions. The play becomes a formative occasion for them to reckon also with the price of virtue. If virtue always led to rescue and reward, surely more people would tell the truth, give generously, and defend the vulnerable. But that’s not how virtue works; and it’s not how our callings work either. By all accounts, Cordelia did the right thing. And she lost her life for it.
As Miller-McLemore suggests, talking honestly about these tensions can reset our expectations. Such conversations can happen in office hours or in advising sessions as we give students language for the vocational pressures they’re experiencing. But it can also happen in a literature classroom, as students grapple with narratives that disrupt their expectations. “Through critique and reflection,” Stephanie Johnson and Erin VanLaningham note, “students learn how to negotiate conflicts of meaning and purpose and how to embrace the revision of self and society.” This interpretive process—especially when it doesn’t resolve easily—thus becomes a site of vocational maturity.
Julianne Sandberg is an associate professor of English at Samford University, where she teaches first-year writing courses and British literature. Her teaching and scholarship often explore the intersection between theology and literature, and she is the author of Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist. A participant in the 2025 NetVUE Writing Colloquy, she writes about life, literature, and faith on her blog, A Companioned Life. For more posts by Julianne, visit her author page on this blog.