Part 19 (1/2)

As flies to wanton boys are we to the G.o.ds; They kill us for their sport;

Edgar:

Think that the clearest G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.s 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,

This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble, Touches us not with pity.

Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares

The G.o.ds are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us,

and Edmund himself a.s.sents. 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 pa.s.sionate 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 _Oth.e.l.lo_.

3

For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice and love of G.o.d. 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 Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are the sufferings of a strong man like Oth.e.l.lo to those of helpless age?

Much too that we have already observed--the repet.i.tion 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 Allow[150] 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 piteousness,