his master as “the mirror of mild patience” had some bearing on the finer phrase which Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Lear himself, “the pattern of all patience” (iii. 2. 37). There can be no doubt that Shakespeare knew this early play. In itself it is of little account; and yet there are not wanting qualities which show that the story only awaited the master hand' to touch it to finer issues.

It is also certain that Sidney's Arcadia 1 is the source of the Gloucester story – the underplot that is interwoven with marvellous skill and is so striking a foil to the main theme. The prototypes of Gloucester and Edgar are the “Paphlagonian unkind king and his kind son,” whose “pitiful state” is recounted in the second book of Sidney's pastoral romance. Though the story is reproduced in all its essentials, it has furnished Shakespeare with nothing but the bare facts of his underplot.2

But when all Shakespeare's borrowings are put together -- even though account be taken of those matters in which his debt is very doubtful — how small a part do they form of King Lear! The intermingling of the Gloucester episode has entailed new incidents and changed the working out of the catastrophe. The presence of Edmund enhances the villainy of Goneril and Regan, and their adulterous love leads to their deaths. In the older versions their part was ended with the victory of Lear. Shakespeare alone has given a sad ending to the play; and although, as we have seen, he incurred thereby the censure of eighteenth century critics and actors, it is the only ending that is artistically possible. That Lear should be restored and reign happily is fitting enough in the meager stories of Holinshed or the early dramatist, but the tragic intensity which Shakespeare could give the more easily by the addition of the Gloucester episode makes any other ending than his lame and inept. There is no borrowing in the feigned madness of Edgar, por in the real madness of Lear the central circumstance, the very essence of the play; and the character of the Fool is Shakespeare's creation. In these points, as in all that gives the play its value, the only "source" is Shakespeare himself. In addition there is the whole setting, and in particular the storm which symbolizes the “great

1 The passage from which Shakespeare borrowed is reprinted in Appendix A.

2 Some of the older critics, e.g. Johnson and Hazlitt, thought that the play was "founded upon an old ballad," A Lamentable Song of the Death of King Leare and his Three Daughters. But this is apparently of later date than Shakespeare's play. It was published, probably for the first time, in Richard Johnson's Golden Garlands of Princely Pleasures and Delicate Delights (1620), and h been reprinted in Wilfrid Perrett's The Story of King Lear (1904), pp. 125-142.

commotion in the moral world”; and there is the characterization, by which the shadows and puppets of the early stories are turned into flesh and blood.

4. CRITICAL APPRECIATION

The play of King Lear presents certain peculiarities in point of structure. It diverges nsiderably from the form of the Shakespearean dramas with which it is generally associated — Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth - and it is even more irregular than the first of these. It is unique in the importance of the opening scene. There is no introductory passage to explain or throw light on the story that is to be unfolded, or, as in Macbeth, to symbolize it. We are introduced straightway to the action on which the whole play depends. The first scene on this account has been stigmatized by Goethe as irrational; but the structure of the play emphasizes the fact that the deeds which call the play into being are in themselves of little importance. King Lear recounts the consequences following inevitably on a rash and foolish act. Another arrangement of the opening scenes would have tended to give more prominence than the theme of the drama allowed to an act which is important only in so far as it is the occasion of others.

The importance of the underplot is the most notable point in the 1 structure of King Lear. Its bearing on the whole play seems almost to mark it out as a survival of the discarded parallelisms of the earlier comedies. But it has a purely artistic value, for it is added not in order to complicate the story, but to enforce its motive.] It is in fact a triumphant vindication of the underplot, a characteristic of the romantic drama on which the formal classical critics looked askance. The Gloucester story has had its full share of condemnation by those who are prejudiced by recognized dramatic rules. Joseph Warton, for instance, singled out, as one of the “considerable imperfections” with which the play is chargeable, “the plot of Edmund against his brother, which distracts the attention and destroys the unity of the fable.” His other observations on King Lear contain passages of wholehearted and eloquent praise, but on this point he was so blinded by the prevailing classicism of the eighteenth century as to fail to recognize that the underplot, far from distracting the attention, really adds to the intensity. Such objections have been answered once and for all in a memorable

"1

i The Adventurer, No. 122, January 5, 1754, Warton's third and concluding paper of “Observations on King Lear."

passage by Schlegel. “The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue of the dénouement must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloucester for the fate of Lear becomes the means which enables his son Edmund to effect his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the saviour of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril, and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. The laws of the drama have therefore been sufficiently complied with; but that is the least. It is the very combination which constitutes the sublime beauty of the work. The two cases resemble each other in the main: an infatuated father is blind towards his well-disposed child, and the unnatural children, whom he prefers, requite him by the ruin of all his happiness. But all the circumstances are so different that these stories, while they each make a correspondent impression on the heart, form a complete contrast for the imagination. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world.” 1 The story of the victim of his own misdeeds is so skillfully interwoven with the story of the victim of his indiscretions, and is brought into so suggestive opposition, that the effect of each is more impressive. The Gloucester story in itself does not offer any striking chance of successful dramatic treatment, and in respect to the feigned madness of Edgar it rather lends itself to comedy, but attains a tragic power by its association with the story of Lear. On the other hand, the main theme is raised by this conjunction above a purely personal matter, and we are the more readily brought to think of Lear, not as the man, but as the victim of filial ingratitude.

Despite these apparently discordant. elements, King Lear has complete unity of spirit. But in achieving this unity the art of Shakespeare has nowhere triumphed more completely than in the case of the Fool. In less skillful hands his presence would have been inimical to the pity and terror of the tragedy. We have seen how actors, for a period of over a hundred and fifty years, from the

1 A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (English translation, 1879, p. 412).

days of Tate to Macready, banished the Fool from the stage because of their failure to recognize the importance of his part. Even in restoring him Macready did not do him justice, for he regarded him as a mere youth, and accordingly intrusted the part to an actress. The Fool's remarks are those of a man of full and rich experience of life He is not a clown like Othello's servant, introduced merely for the sake of variety. He bears a much closer resemblance to the Fools of the later comedies, to Touchstone in As You Like It and Feste in Twelfth Night. Like Touchstone, “he uses his folly like a stalkinghorse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.” At first there is a sharpness in his taunts, for he hopes thereby, with the frankness that is the privilege of his position, to awaken the king to a knowledge of what he has done. Afterward, when the worst has come to the worst, his wit has the gentler aim of relieving Lear's anguish. He no longer “teaches” Lear, but “labours to outjest his heart-struck injuries.” He seems to give expression to the thought lurking deep in Lear's mind, as is shown by the readiness with which Lear catches at everything he says, or to voice the counsels of discretion. And he finally disappears from the play when Lear is mad. The Fool is, in fact, Lear's familiar spirit. I He is Lear's only companion in the fateful step of going out into the night and braving the storm. Even then, as if in astonishment that his sorrows had not destroyed all his regard for others, Lear says, “I have one part in my heart that's sorry yet for thee.” How, then, may it be asked, can the Fool possibly be omitted from King Lear?

Apart from this consideration, the Fool has an important function in the drama. The eighteenth century actors unconsciously testified to this, for when they banished the Fool as “a character not to be endured on the modern stage," they with one exception — and success did not attend this effort — made good the want by mawkish love scenes. These they preferred to a rôle that was regarded only as burlesque. But the artful prattle of the Fool does more than give variety and relax the strain on one's feelings. It makes Lear's lot endurable to us, but at the same time it gives us a keener sense of its sadness. The persistent reminders of Lear's folly, the recurring presentment of ideas in a new and stronger light, the caustic wit hidden in a seemingly casual romarke all bring home more forcibly the pity of Lear's plight. In a word, the Fool intensifies the pathos by relieving it."

1 In this connection it is well to record the opinion of Shelley, expressed in his Defence of Poetry: "The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy,

ད

The character of Lear is distinct from those of most of Shakespeare's heroes in that it is not revealed gradually. He is described fully in the very first scene. He has had a successful reign, but he is not a strong man. He is headstrong and rash, and old age has brought "unruly waywardness" and vanity. The play as a whole deals with the effects produced upon this passionate character by a foolish act for which he alone is responsible. The story is strictly that of a British king who began to rule "in the year of the world 3105, at what time Joas reigned in Juda." But Shakespeare has converted it into a tale of universal interest. He makes it but a basis for what Keats has called "the fierce dispute betwixt Hell torment and impassioned clay."1 All the details of the story are of little importance in themselves, and the art of Shakespeare makes us forget them in thinking of the total effect to which they contribute. The real subject of the pl The real subject of the play is not so much Lear as the outraged "Nobody from reading Shakespeare,” says Hazlitt, “would know (except from the Dramatis Persona) that Lear was an English king. He is merely a king and a father. The ground is common: but what a well of tears has he dug out of it! There are no data in history to go upon; no advantage is taken of costume, no acquaintance with geography or architecture or dialect is necessary; but there is an old tradition, human nature, an old temple, the human mind, and Shakespeare walks into it and looks about him with a lordly eye, and seizes on the sacred spoils as his own. The story is a thousand or two years old, and yet the tragedy has no smack of antiquarianism in it.” 2

It is this universal quality which allows such anachronisms as that one character should personate a madman of the seventeenth century and speak a southwestern dialect, or that another should refer to the rules of chivalry. The very greatness of King Lear, the subordination and even abrogation of all detail, abundant though it is, made Charles Lamb declare the play essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. "The greatness of Lear,” he says, "is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explothough liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be, as in King Lear, universal, ideal, sublime. It is perhaps the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of King Lear against Edipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon.... King Lear, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world, in spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe." 1 Sonnet written before re-reading "King Lear."

2 Hazlitt, "Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare," in The Plain-Speaker.