A plague upon you, murderers, traitors, all! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft, I have seen the day with my good biting faulchion [To all. [To Kent. Mine eyes are not of the best:-I'll tell you straight. Kent. If fortune brag of two she loved and hated, Your servant Kent: where is your servant Caius ? Lear. He's a good fellow, I can tell you that. He'll strike, and quickly too: he's dead and rotten. Kent. No, my good lord, I am the very man Lear. I'll see that straight. Kent. That from your first of difference and decay Lear. You are welcome hither. Kent. Nor no man else; all's cheerless, dark and deadly. Ay, so I think. Lear. Alb. He knows not what he says, and vain it is, That we present us to him. Edgar. Very bootless. O! see! see! Lear. And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life: And thou no breath at all? Thou 'lt come no more, Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.— Kent. Break heart; I pray thee, break! My lord! My lord! Vex not his ghost! Edgar. Kent. Lear dies. [Music very soft and mournful, to end of the scene. O, let him pass; he hates him, That would upon the rack of this tough world KING LEAR. APPENDIX. 1.-THE CHARACTER OF KING LEAR. HE elements and attributes of Lear are not obscurely furnished. TH He comes before us, at the first, an old man, but not decrepit a man who is beginning to break, but who is not yet broken. His aspect is massive, majestic and venerable. He still wears dominion in his countenance. He is exceedingly tender in heart and magnanimous in disposition. His age is that of simplicity and goodness; but his mind is blindly suspicious of its own decadence; and he will prove exacting, irrational, fiery, capricious and unpleasant, after the fashion of choleric and selfish senility. In the fibre of his character, however, -in his essential personality and interior spirit,- he is, above all things else, large, spacious, and noble. He is not a common man grown old. He must, all his life, have carried the stamp and the magnetic allurement and domination of a great and charming nature. He must have captured hearts and ruled minds by something beautiful and strong in his fate. He does not hold royalty by lineage or by human law alone, but by divine endowment. He is born to the purple. He is a mountain in the midst of a plain; and the crumbling of his mind and fortunes is like the fall of the avalanche. Vitalized with this immaculate and charming excellence, endowed with this innate majesty, and invested with this personal grandeur, he becomes the most colossal figure that ever was reared in the Pantheon of the human imagination; and his experience, his suffering, his frenzy, his senile insanity, and the whirlwind of agony in which he dies, become tremendous and overwhelming. It is not old Brabantio, or old Capulet, or even old Shylock, who goes mad, under the strokes of unkindness, the wear of age, the ravages of tempest, and the human woes and spiritual perplexities of life: it is old Lear: and when this awful presence totters, with streaming white hair and blazing eye-balls, across the thunder-riven heath, under the night and through the storm, he breaks our hearts, not alone with afflicting sense of the torment into which he has fallen, but of the stately yet lovable nobility from which he fell. King Lear is an august and splendid personality, and he bears the authentic sceptre of sorrow. We see him torn from all moorings and driven out upon the gale-swept ocean-wastes of misery; but it is less for what he suffers than for what he is, that we pity, and love, and reverence, and deplore him. The highest and best elements of our human nature are felt to be crystallized and combined in this woeful, terrific image of shattered royalty; and so his misery comes home to us with a keen personal force. There are many denotements of this imperial fascination, which the pervading and characteristic quality of Lear, and which has enthroned him in the love of all the world. It is the soul of the character. It links to the ruined monarch all the virtues that surround his time and person. It holds the heart-strings of the celestial Cordelia. It holds the devotion of the wise and honest Kent. Nothing, indeed, can be more significant of what Lear is than the passionate fealty of this follower, who "from the first of difference and decay" has attended his steps, and who will not be left by him, even at the brink of the grave. II. "I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: My master calls me-I must not say no." ORIGIN, BASIS, AND DATE OF King Lear. W. W. The story of Lear and his daughters was found by Shakespeare in Holinshed, and he may have taken a few hints from an old play, "The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir." In both Holinshed's version and that of the "True Chronicle" the army of Lear and his French allies is victorious; Lear is re-instated in his kingdom; but Holinshed relates how, after Lear's death, her sisters' sons warred against Cordelia and took her prisoner, when, "being a woman of a manly courage, and despairing to recover liberty," she slew herself. The story is also told by Higgins in the "Mirror for Magistrates;" by Spenser ("Faerie Queene," II., x. 27-32), from whom Shakespeare adopted the form of the name, Cordelia;" and in a ballad (printed in Percy's "Reliques") probably later in date than Shakespeare's play. With the story of Lear Shakespeare connects that of Gloster and his two sons. An episode in Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" supplied characters and incidents for this portion of the play,-Sidney's blind king of Paphlagonia corresponding to the Gloster of Shakespeare. But here, too, the story had, in the dramatist's original, a happy ending: the Paphlagonian king is restored to his throne and the brothers are reconciled. |