intellect too rigid and untaught to find its bearings in a world where its will is thwarted. But the shock which blurs his senses startles into activity new faculties of apprehension and divination. Insensibly before our eyes the proportions of things change, the irrational and intractable old man grows into the sublime embodiment of 'a grandeur that baffles the malice of daughters and of storms'; 'in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.'1

Then the lurid splendour fades, the great rage expires, and all that is left in the ruined mind, his vehement, childlike need of love, flings him, helpless as a child, into Cordelia's healing and upholding The gladness of her presence irradiates his

arms.

mind:

Come, let's away to prison :

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage :

And take upon's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies :

She fans the frail spark of his existence, and with the inexorable fate that stops her breath, it expires. Thus Shakespeare brings the old 'tragic tale' of Cordelia's desperate death, like all the other miseries of the story, into relation with the supreme pathos of the fate of Lear.

Story.

It was evidently as a foil to Lear's sublime agony The Gloster that Shakespeare introduced the crasser and more material Nemesis that visits the kindred folly of Gloster. The two stories have the obtrusive parallelism of Shakespeare's early comic plots-one of several

1 Charles Lamb.

points in which the drama on the technical side might be described as an assemblage of Shakespeare's discarded methods, touched to finer issues. In detail, however, they betray at once the different quality of their origin. Gloster's relations to Edmund and Edgar are expanded from the brief episode, in Sidney's Arcadia, of the Paphlagonian 'unkind king,' who is blinded by the son he favours, and the 'kind son' who then saves him by Edgar's dangerously fantastic stratagem. Across the woof of an immemorial Celtic folk-tale Shakespeare thus threw the modern fancy arabesque of an accomplished poet, with its deliberate audacities of horror and romance. The Gloster story echoes the theme of the Lear story in a duller and more conventional key, as the Laertes story echoes the story of Hamlet. The wrongs done and suffered are more grossly and glaringly criminal; but more deserved and less pathetic. Gloster's blinding far exceeds in material savagery any suffering inflicted upon Lear; but his dejected patience as he gropes with eyeless orbs towards Dover recalls only the meek suffering of the Leir of the Chronicle. His pangs stir in him no tempest of the mind. 'Poetic justice' is sublimely defied in the doom of Lear and of Cordelia; but Gloster is blinded by the child of his pleasant vices, and Edmund slain by the brother he has wronged. As Lear's tempest of the mind is opposed to Gloster's torments of the flesh, so the subtle malignity and blind, suicidal passion of Goneril and Regan stand in contrast with the cool, pragmatic villany of Gloster. Goneril and Their common passion for him is the most salient trait added by Shakespeare to the Goneril and Regan of tradition, and the death of one at the hands of the other strikes a last fierce note from the chord of violated blood-ties that resounds through

Regan.

the play. But the dagger and the poison-bowl are not the habitual methods of the Shakespearean Regan and Goneril. They affect a subtler and more impalpable cruelty, conveyed through the forms of legal and speciously reasonable acts. Goneril does not, as in the old play, inflame Regan against Lear by slander, nor does Regan hire a murderer to despatch him. The exposure of Lear to the night and storm is, with wonderful art, made to appear the result of his headstrong choice. The two interwoven stories thus carry us through the whole gamut of suffering. No other tragedy is so charged with pain, so crowded with contrivers of harm. But no other is so lighted up with heroic goodness. The querulous laments of old Gloster over the 'machinations, hollowness, treachery, and ruinous disorders' of the time,-'in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason,'-express the groundwork of the tragedy, but hardly its groundtone. Anarchy is rampant, but true hearts abound,— lonely beacons of the moral order which is half effaced in the social fabric. Fidelity and frankness were the salient traits of the traditional Cordelia. Shakespeare not only gives these traits a heightened beauty in her, but repeats them, subtly varied and modulated, in a series of other characters;-in the rough-tongued, loyal Kent; in Cornwall's brave 'dunghill slave,' who insolently avenges the blinding of Gloster; and, not least, in that exquisite scherzo to Cordelia's andante the Fool. This characteristic type of the Comedies appears nowhere else in tragedy; but in the close of the comic period we find the Fool shaping towards the functions he performs in Lear. Frankness was his official prerogative; fidelity his added grace. The calamities of As You Like It are as the passing of a summer cloud compared with

The

those of Lear; but such as they are, Touchstone shares in them, throwing in his lot with his banished mistresses, and pricking their romantic extravagances with the rough-hewn bolts of his dry brain. overwhelming pathos of Lear is evolved from a situation in itself quite as capable of yielding farce; and as the tragedy deepens, humour melts into pathos in the chorus-like comments of the more exquisite and finely - tempered Touchstone who follows the king into the night and storm, and vanishes from our ken, like a wild dream-fancy, when the troubled morning breaks.

KING LEAR

ACT I.

SCENE I. King Lear's palace.

Enter KENT, GLOUCESTER, and EDMUND. Kent. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

Glou. It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most; for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

Kent. Is not this your son, my lord?

Glou. His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge: I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to it.

Kent. I cannot conceive you.

Glou. Sir, this young fellow's mother could:

5f. equalities are so weighed, etc., i.e. their shares are SO nicely balanced that the closest scrutiny detects no superiority in either. Equalities; so Qq. Ff 'qualities.' The textual notes upon this play cannot attempt to convey an adequate

10

impression of the countless divergences between Qq and Ff, or of the general inferiority of the former. The Qq readings will only be noticed where they are either adopted or at least plausible.

C