lightening of the heart? Terror and pity are here too much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words. She brings us too the relief of joy and admiration, a joy that is not lessened by her death. Why should she live? If she lived for ever she never could soar a higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing it.1

1 The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which mitigate the excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the downfall of lago, and the fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona and Othello show themselves at their noblest just before death.

KING LEAR has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him best would pronounce for keeping King Lear.

Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The 'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate altered King Lear for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting Edgar in the place of the King of France as as Cordelia's lover. From that time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In 1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in

1838, Macready returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.

What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and playgoer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I venture to doubt it. When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. King Lear seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view, When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears

me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.

it

This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the affinities and the probable chronological position of King Lear. It is allied with two tragedies, Othello and Timon of Athens; and these two tragedies are utterly unlike.1 Othello was probably composed about 1604, and King Lear about 1605; and though there is a somewhat marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those in which evil appears in its coldest

1I leave undiscussed the position of King Lear in relation to the 'comedies' of Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and All's Well.

and most inhuman forms, and those which exclude
the supernatural from the action. But there is
also in King Lear a good deal which sounds like
an echo of Othello,-a fact which should not surprise
us, since there are other instances where the
matter of a play seems to go on working in Shake-
speare's mind and re-appears, generally in a weaker
form, in his next play. So, in King Lear, the
conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of
Goneril. Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund,
though of course essentially distinguished from
Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy,
This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in
the very tone of Iago's discourse on the sovereignty
of the will. The gulling of Gloster, again, recalls
the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not
carried out) of making his father witness, without
over-hearing, his conversation with Edgar, repro-
duces the idea of the passage where Othello watches
Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the
conclusion of the temptation, where Gloster says
to Edmund:
and of my land,

Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means
To make thee capable,

reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, Now art thou my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of certain unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the likelihood that the composition of the one followed at no great distance on that of the other.1

When we turn from Othello to Timon of Athens we find a play of quite another kind. Othello_is dramatically the most perfect of the tragedies. Timon, on the contrary, is weak, ill-constructed and confused; and, though care might have made it clear, no mere care could make it really dramatic.

'See Note R.

Yet it is undoubtedly Shakespearean in part, probably in great part; and it immediately reminds us of King Lear. Both plays deal with the tragic effects of ingratitude. In both the victim is exceptionally unsuspicious, soft-hearted and vehement. In both he is completely overwhelmed, passing through fury to madness in the one case, to suicide in the other. Famous passages in both plays are curses. The misanthropy of Timon pours itself out in a torrent of maledictions on the whole race of man; and these at once recall, alike by their form and their substance, the most powerful speeches uttered by Lear in his madness. In both plays occur repeated comparisons between man and the beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into baboon,' wolf, tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a furious struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The 'pessimistic' strain in Timon suggests to many readers, even more imperatively than King Lear, the notion that Shakespeare was giving vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of his hand appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials of his wrath upon mankind. Timon, lastly, in some of the unquestionably Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so strong a resemblance to King Lear in style and in versification that it is hard to understand how competent judges can suppose that it belongs to a time at all near that of the final romances, or even that it was written so late as the last Roman plays. It is more likely to have been composed immediately after King Lear and before Macbeth.1

Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of art and in tragic power King Lear is infinitely nearer to Othello than to Timon, in its spirit and substance its affinity 'On some of the points mentioned in this paragraph see Note S.