this was the book entered in the Stationers' Register as early as 1594. The edition of 1605 is extant. The original of Shakespeare's faithful Kent was, in all probability, the Perillus of the old play, who grieves over Leir's ruthless doom' of Cordella, and to whom the king replies as in Shakespeare's tragedy :

Urge this no more, and if thou love thy life.

Mr. W. J. Craig pointed out in addition to this that the unscrupulous Messenger' of the old play may have suggested his Oswald to Shakespeare. It is possible, indeed, that the publication of The True Chronicle History in 1605, instead of being called forth by the appearance of King Lear upon the stage may have suggested to Shakespeare a new and greater rendering of the theme. The ballad which appears in Percy's Reliques is almost certainly unconnected with the origin of the tragedy; it can hardly be questioned that the ballad is the later in date. In several important particulars, and especially in the close of the story, Shakespeare varies from all his predecessors. The tragic termination is wholly of his invention. The pathetic figure of Lear's Fool is created by Shakespeare. The introduction of the Duke of Burgundy as a suitor for Cordelia's hand, the amorous passion of the two sisters for Edmund, the madness of the old and outraged king are found nowhere but in the tragedy. Shakespeare alone heightens the effect of that upheaval of nature which we feel in the injuries of a father at the hands of his daughters by showing it repeated in the wrongs of Gloucester, inflicted by the hands of a son.

For the secondary plot of Gloucester the dramatist was indebted to Sidney's Arcadia. In the second book of that romance, first published in 1590, appears an episode entitled 'The pitifull state, and storie of the Paphlagonian vnkinde King, and his kind sonne, first related by the son, then by the blind father'. Like Gloucester the King of Paphlagonia has been betrayed, and driven forth in blindness-but without such an intermediary as Cornwall-from his dwelling, by the

devices of an illegitimate son; like Gloucester he is guided in his darkness by a true son of lawful wedlock whom he has cruelly wronged; like Gloucester he seeks for death by precipitation from a height; and when the story is told in the romance the father and the faithful son are sheltering in hollows of the rock from a pitiless storm. With Sidney the old king is reinstated in his throne, and friendly relations between the brothers are restored. It was a bold design of Shakespeare to enhance the terror and pity of his tragedy by a secondary plot which has so much in common with that which is primary; perhaps from a merely theatrical point of view it complicates the action to excess, though it does not really divide the interest; but the poetical effect is enhanced, as that of a thunderstorm by reverberations among the mountains.

King Lear is assuredly the supreme effort of Shakespeare's genius; but as a piece of dramatic art it does not take the first place among his works. The two impressions which it leaves upon the mind have been admirably expressed by Dr. Bradley: 'King Lear seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play... When I regard it strictly as a drama, it appears to 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 it 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.' Here Shakespeare has disclosed the Inferno of human nature as he saw it; and yet our final impression has not in it a touch of what has been called pessimism, for he conducts us also to his Paradiso, and we see the unfaltering fidelity of Kent, the championship of right by Edgar, the distracted yet exquisite loyalty of Lear's poor boy', and the very heart of Dante's 'Rose of the

Blessed' in Cordelia's love. And as for Lear himself, is he not at once humbled and uplifted by suffering, reduced from his pride and self-will to kinship and sympathy with all afflicted humanity, and ennobled at the close by self-renouncing passion, which makes death an incident that cannot really hurt his inmost being ? Nothing is more tragic than the last scene of the play; yet we are appeased far more than if the old king were restored to his throne and surrounded by a crew of applauding courtiers :

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

The gods themselves throw incense.

Human trial and anguish touch a height like that on which Prometheus was chained, and yet the poem might well be named the redemption of King Lear. The mystery of evil remains; we cannot interpret it, but the angel in humanity transcends the mystery and is unappalled.

Both Victor Hugo and his son François-Victor Hugo-the translator of Shakespeare's works-have written eloquently of this tragedy. But the former regarded it as if Lear existed for the sake of making Cordelia known to us aright, and the latter viewed it too much as a domestic drama, a tragedy of the family. Such views are inadequate, yet Victor Hugo's error bears witness to the fact that Cordelia's unspoken love penetrates through every part of the play; though in fact little more than a hundred lines are assigned to her. She cannot heave her heart into her mouth; its passion is inexpressible, and, indignant with her sisters' self-interested professions of affection, her lips do an injustice to her affections. But Kent and the Fool, who pines when she is absent, understand her, and Edgar is her fellow worker for good. The play is much more than a drama which may be classed under the rubric La Famille'. The whole of humanity, as far as it is here represented, is divided into the combatants who take the side of hatred and the combatants who take the side of love, and all are gathered about

the central figure of the great sufferer. Nature itself seems to take part in the vast contention; but nature, which appears cruel in the night of storm upon the heath, is really cruel only to be kind, for such hardness helps in the purgation of Lear; never is he more gentle than when he urges his 'poor boy' into the hovel, never so truly wise as when his wits begin

to turn:

Come, your hovel,

Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.

Evil is shown in King Lear in monstrous proportions, because Shakespeare, while recognizing its existence, would have us feel that it is something abnormal— more hideous than the sea-monster. Edmund has touches of humanity which are wanting in Iago-not merely in his dying word :

:

Some good I mean to do
Despite of mine own nature,

but even in that other dying word of strange pride in the passion for which he was the centre, Yet Edmund was belov'd.' The tragedy needs some force of evil which is unsubduable, and we find it in the marblehearted Goneril.

the

Charles Lamb maintained in a well-known passage that the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted: contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.' Perhaps with some sense that the tragedy was not at its best upon the stage, Nahum Tate lowered it to a play with a happy ending. His version, printed in 1681, appeared and reappeared in the theatre during upwards of a century. He rectified what was wanting in the regularity and probability of the tale, he informs us, by running through the whole a love betwixt

Edgar and Cordelia. The Fool disappears; perhaps he too was irregular, but Tate could not feel the heartrending notes of Shakespeare's violin. It was in this version that Garrick appeared as Lear in 1741-2. Even Johnson countenanced it with his approval. Edmund Kean restored the fifth Act in 1823; The London audience,' he said to his wife, have no notion of what I can do till they see me over the dead body of Cordelia.' Some of the spectators of Edwin Booth's Lear may think that he was got up with too great a resemblance to old Father Christmas; it was a remarkable performance, but, as we witnessed the storm scene, the comment of Charles Lamb haunted our mind. Amends were made in the wonderful tent scene, where the tenderness could not be more exquisite nor the pathos more poignant.

SH. VIII