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This article explores how the female figures of King Lear address the nature of Reformation believing. By "figures" I mean both the characters and tropes of female identity. By "believing" I mean the experience of inhabiting and being inhabited by some idea concerning the world, the otherworld, or another person. I seek, in effect, to use this play to probe an analogy and a complicity between faith in affective objects and spiritual ones: Why and how do convictions concerning erotic objects resemble those concerning salvation? More to the point, how does the anxiety attendant upon a Calvinist God play itself out in the plane of social knowledge, and why does the failure of faith in the reciprocity of human love comport itself much like soteriological crisis? More generally, why do these two experiences share in the literature of this period a vocabulary, affect, and evidentiary structure? And what does that resemblance tell us about not what, but how, believing occurs in this moment: What kind of an activity is it? What are its objects, subjects, habits, and representations? Much of our recent investigation into early modern thought has concerned itself with what people believed (the Elizabethan world picture? witches? monarchy? liberalism?). Such inquiries have been chiefly concerned with political identities and beliefs conceived of as a matter of dissent or assent. A Renaissance subject in such work is, for example, either "for" social order or against it, contained by it or subversive to it (usually the former). Histories of Reformation religious identities often operate along similar lines, asking, for example, was Christopher Marlowe an atheist, or was Shakespeare a Catholic? Such investigation first identifies a thinkable thought and then searches the thinker, via his text, for signs of its presence, which tends to be imagined as an

Why should contemporary writers resurrect ancient ritual instructions known in the West as books of the dead? ' Norman Mailer delved laboriously into Egyptian religious practices in Ancient Evenings (1983), and he was accused, for his pains, of pandering to a popular taste for "upmarket novelty locations."2 William Burroughs's use of the Egyptian otherworld in The Western Lands (1987) and Thomas Pynchon's of the Tibetan in Vineland (1990) have been noted by critics but not seriously examined. Kathy Acker's work in this vein has been entirely overlooked. Her little story called "The World," appended to Blood and Guts in High School (1984), is based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Furthermore, she illustrated it herself with pictures that mingle Egyptian and Tantric themes.

Several insights should by now be clear to all students of Nabokov who have assimilated the critical literature of the past twenty years: that he is a Romantic who views this world as a parody of the otherworld, causing his works to abound in doublings, mirrorings, and inversions; that the glimmerings of another existence beyond our own may occasionally be discerned in nature, in fate's workings, in art; and that the puzzles and rich referentiality of Nabokov's texts to other literature are designed to send the reader on a quest for the transcendent. Early critics of Nabokov's work mistakenly viewed his fictional worlds as hermetic, as arcane self-referential systems designed as metaliterary manifestos; Page Stegner's Escape into Aesthetics is a frequently reviled pure example, but Alfred Appel's pioneering work, focused as it was on modernism, erred in the metaliterary direction as well.1 After Ellen Pifer dared to show us Nabokov's concern with universal human issues, Brian Boyd's book on Ada also stressed the humanity of Nabokov's