Gloster:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; 3
They kill us for their sport;

Edgar:

Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours

Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.

Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power. And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought, often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm seems the messenger of heaven:

Let the great gods,

That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,

Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes. . .

...

At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:

Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just;

and Gloster has almost the same thought (Iv. i. 67 ff.) Gloster again, thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,

but I shall see

The winged vengeance overtake such children.

The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished. One cries, I'll never care what wickedness I do,

If this man come to good;

and another,

if she live long,

And in the end meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.

Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,

This shows you are above,

You justicers, that these our nether crimes

So speedily can venge;

and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,

1

This judgment of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
Touches us not with pity.

Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us,

and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from King Lear an impression which is at least as near of kin to the Divine Comedy as to Othello.

3

For Dante that which is recorded in the Divine Comedy was the justice and love of God. What did King Lear record for Shakespeare? Something, it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly bad. What is lago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What

1'justice,' Qq.

S

2

3

are the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age? Much too that we have already observed-the repetition of the main theme. in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe—these, with much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,

O heavens,

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow1 obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause:

is immediately answered by the iron voices of his
daughters, raising by turns the conditions on which
they will give him a humiliating harbourage; or
that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteous-

ness,

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both:

is immediately answered from the heavens by the
sounds of the breaking storm? Albany and Edgar
may moralise on the divine justice as they will,
but how, in face of all that we see, shall we
believe that they speak Shakespeare's mind? Is
not his mind rather expressed in the bitter contrast
between their faith and the events we witness, or in
the scornful rebuke of those who take upon them
the mystery of things as if they were God's spies?

1=approve.

The direction 'Storm and empest' at the end of this speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.

The gods are mentioned many times in King Lear, but 'God' only here (v. ii. 16).

Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind that we hear in Lear's appeal,

And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?

Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read King Lear. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. King Lear has been held to be profoundly pessimistic' in the full meaning of that word,-the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part of this view,1 the rest may claim some support even

The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'

There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important. (1) On the one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Timon, Macbeth, is correct, these tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and King Lear and Timon lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida and perhaps All's Well. But about these comedies there is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little mirth; in Measure for Measure perhaps, certainly in Troilus and Cressida, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With Macbeth perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed, the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and

from the greatest of Shakespearean critics since. the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that King Lear is 'by far the most Aeschylean of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:

But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind

even into a mirth almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the arrival and progress of middle age.

(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the multitudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (Troilus and Cressida and his part of Timon are the possible exceptions) in which there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening personal note: for although Othello is darker than Hamlet it surely strikes one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring Troilus and Cressida chronologically close to King Lear and Timon; even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be decidedly earlier than those plays.

The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of his in writing such plays as Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Timon. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any considerable time, if ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic' conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in his works. The choice of the subject of ingratitude, for instance, in King Lear and Timon, and the method of handling it, may have been due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of King Lear can be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the text.