COMMENTS By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS LEAR But this drama is primarily the drama of Lear. Lear disturbs the harmony of the ethical institutions of both State and Family. Long years of absolute power have developed the tyrant dominated by selfishness; weary of care, he would shirk the responsibilities of government, but retain the pleasures of its outward show; he forsakes reason and suffers the penalty of reason forsaking him; the State is nothing to him; he would throw government aside like a cast-off garment; his daughter Cordelia cannot play false like her treacherous sisters, and he thrusts her aside as easily as an impatient child tosses away the toy which cannot obey his bidding. If she goes with some bitterness in her heart, her inherent love of truth develops into the truth of love, and she returns only to be sacrificed. Since Lear's sin is so great that Nemesis will only be satisfied with his tragic end, his deed returns upon his own head. Nemesis follows Regan and Goneril, and they suffer the penalty of their own wicked deeds; if we see in Cordelia's violent death only "dramatic pathos," this by no means infringes upon the general law of retribution, but simply shows that while evil deeds bring their own punishment, all misfortune is not necessarily the result of wrongdoing.-FERRIS-GETTEMY, Outline Studies in Shakespear ean Drama. Of all Shakspere's plays Macbeth is the most rapid, Hamlet the slowest, in movement. Lear combines length with rapidity, like the hurricane and the whirlpool, ab sorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the tempest. It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual;—the intense desire of being intensely beloved, selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone; the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast; the cravings after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims;—the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;-these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and disappointed.-COLERIDGE, Lectures on Shakspere. The thoughtless confidence of Lear in his children has something in it far more touching than the self-beggary of Timon; though both one and the other have prototypes enough in real life, and as we give the old king more of our pity, so a more intense abhorrence accompanies his daughters and the evil characters of that drama than we spare for the miserable sycophants of the Athenian. There seems to have been a period of Shakespeare's life when his heart was ill at ease, and ill-content with the world as his own conscience; the memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the experience of man's worser nature which intercourse with unworthy associates, by choice or circumstance, peculiarly teaches;-these, as they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of one primary character, the censurer of mankind.-HALLAM, Introduction to the Literature of Europe. CORDELIA There is in the beauty of Cordelia's character an effect too sacred for words, and almost too deep for tears; within her heart is a fathomless well of purest affection, but its waters sleep in silence and obscurity,-never failing in their depth and never overflowing in their fullness. Every thing in her seems to lie beyond our view, and affects us in a manner which we feel rather than perceive. The character appears to have no surface, no salient points upon which the fancy can readily seize: there is little external development of intellect, less of passion, and still less of imagination. It is completely made out in the course of a few scenes, and we are surprised to find that in those few scenes there is matter for a life of reflection, and materials enough for twenty heroines. If Lear be the grandest of Shakespeare's tragedies, Cordelia in herself, as a human being, governed by the purest and holiest impulses and motives, the most refined from all dross of selfishness and passion, approaches near to perfection; and in her adaptation, as a dramatic personage, to a determinate plan of action, may be pronounced altogether perfect. The character, to speak of it critically as a poetical concep tion, is not, however, to be comprehended at once, or easily; and in the same manner Cordelia, as a woman, is one whom we must have loved before we could have known her, and known her long before we could have known her truly.— JAMESON, Shakespeare's Heroines. "Of the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia, pronounced in so few words, I will venture to speak." This was the impression which Shakspere's Cordelia produced upon Schlegel. In the whole range of the Shakspearean drama there is nothing more extraordinary than the effect upon the mind of the character of Cordelia. Mrs. Jameson has truly said, "Everything in her seems to lie beyond our view, and affects us in a manner which we feel rather than perceive." In the first act she has only fortythree lines assigned to her: she does not appear again till the fourth act, in the fourth scene of which she has twentyfour lines, and, in the seventh, thirty-seven. In the fifth act she has five lines. Yet during the whole progress of the play we can never forget her; and, after its melancholy close, she lingers about our recollections as if we had seen some being more beautiful and purer than a thing of earth, who had communicated with us by a higher nedium than that of words. And yet she is no mere abstraction;—she is nothing more nor less than a personification of the holiness of womanhood. She is a creature formed for all sympathies, moved by all tenderness, prompt for all duty, prepared for all suffering; but she cannot talk of what she is, and what she purposes. The King of France describes the apparent reserve of her character as "A tardiness in nature, Which often leaves the history unspoke That it intends to do." She herself says, "If for I want that glib and oily art, To speak, and purpose not; since what I well intend, -KNIGHT, Pictorial Shakspere. the twil is REGAN AND GONERIL At the first moment the two sisters display no characteristic difference; "as like as a crab is to a crab," says the fool; on a closer inspection it is surprising what a wide and clearly defined contrast there is between the two. The elder, Goneril, with the "wolfish visage" and the dark "frontlet" of ill-humor, is a masculine woman, full of independent purposes and projects, whilst Regan appears more feminine, rather instigated by Goneril, more passive, and more dependent. Goneril's boundless "unbordered" nature, which renders her a true child of that fearful age, shows itself in bloody undertakings, originating in her own brain; whilst Regan's evil nature appears rather in her urging on the atrocities of others, as when Kent is set in the stocks Gloster's eyes are torn out. The worst of to a noble gentleman (Albany), whom she reviles as "a moral fool," whose mildness and repose seem to her “milky gentleness," and whose quiet power and resolute manliness she only later finds reason to discover. The better sister has the worst husband in Cornwall, a man whose wrathful disposition allows of no impediment and bears no remonstrance. Goneril at first appears to govern her husband, who recognizes her depth of foresight, and, until he penetrates her character, avoids discords with her; she pursues her aims independently, scarcely listening to him, and scarcely deigning to answer him; Regan, on the contrary, is obsequious and dependent towards the gloomy, laconic, and powerful Cornwall, who is immovable and resolute in his determination. At the first occasion (Act I, sc. i) Goneril appears as the instigator and Regan as her echo. She it is who afterwards begins to put restraints upon the king; she first treats him disrespectfully, halves and dismisses his attendants, whilst Regan avoids her father with some remains of awe. But she fears her sister still more than her father; she rather suffers her father's messenger to be mistreated than Goneril's servant. Her sister knows her weakness; she does not |