"Leir. Deare Gonorill, kind Ragan, sweet Cordella, Therefore, deare daughters, as ye tender the safety "Gonorill. I hope, my gracious father makes no doubt Of any of his daughters love to him: Yet for my part, to shew my zeal to you, I prize my love to you at such a rate, I thinke my life inferiour to my love. At your commaund I willingly would doe it: And from the top leape headlong to the ground: "Leir. O, how thy words revive my dying soule! I then my deeds should prove in plainer case, I have right noble suters to my love, No worse then kings, and happely I love one: "Leir. Did never Philomel sing so sweet a note. I hope my deeds shall make report for me: "Gonorill. Here is an answere answerlesse indeed: Were you my daughter, I should scarcely brooke it. "Ragan. Dost thou not blush, proud peacock as thou art, To make our father such a slight reply? "Leir. Why how now, minion, are you growne so proud! Doth our deare love make you thus peremptory? What, is your love become so small to us, As that you scorne to tell us what it is? Who by disobedience short their father's dayes, And so would you; some are so father-sick, That they make meanes to rid them from the world; And so are you. But, didst thou know, proud girle, Ah, then thou wouldst say as thy sisters do: "Cordella. Deare father, do not so mistake my words, Nor my plaine meaning be misconstrued; My toung was never usde to flattery. "Gonorill. You were not best say I flatter: if you do, My deeds shall shew, I flatter not with you. I love my father better then thou canst. "Cordella. The praise were great, spoke from another's mouth: But it should seeme your neighbours dwell far off. "Ragan. Nay, here is one, that will confirme as much As she hath said, both for myselfe and her. I say, thou dost not wish my father's good. "Cordella. Deare father "Leir. Peace, bastard impe, no issue of king Leir, I will not heare thee speake one tittle more. Call not me father, if thou love thy life, Nor these thy sisters once presume to name: Looke for no helpe henceforth from me or mine; Shift as thou wilt, and trust unto thyselfe: My kingdome will I equally devide "Twixt thy two sisters to their royal dowre, And will bestow them worthy their deserts: This done, because thou shalt not have the hope To have a child's part in the time to come, I presently will dispossesse myselfe, And set up these upon my princely throne. "Gonorill. lever thought that pride would have a fall. "Ragan. Plaine dealing sister: your beauty is so sheene, You need no dowry, to make you be a queene. [Exeunt LEIR, GONORILL, RAGAN. Mr. Skottowe has, with great diligence and minuteness, attempted to trace Shakspere in what he is supposed to have borrowed from the old play, and also in the points of difference. Our readers will easily imagine, from the extract with which we have furnished them, that Shakspere had, at all events, to create the poetical diction of Lear, without any obligation to his lumbering predecessor. In the conduct of the plot he is equally original. It may be sufficient for us to state that of the madness of Lear we have no trace in the old play; and that, like the chronicle, it ends with the triumphant restoration of Lear to his kingdom. Knowing this, we think that our readers will agree with us that it would be a waste of time to trace such resemblances as Mr Skottowe has described in the following passage: "How noble is the burst of passion, agony, and remorse, that succeed the disappointment of Shakspeare's king! 'Life and death! I am asham'd That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus: That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, "And Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again I'll pluck you out; "You think, I'll weep; No, I'll not weep: I have full cause for weeping; but this heart "To these passages the author of the old play derives some slight claim; for his Leir weeps after the vituperations of Gonorill, and Ragan observes 'He cannot speak for weeping.'" There is a ballad, printed in 'Percy's Reliques,' on the story of Lear. It is without a date, and Percy says, "Here is found the hint of Lear's madness, which the old chronicles do not mention, as also the extravagant cruelty exercised on him by his daughters. In the death of Lear they likewise very exactly coincide. The misfortune is, that there is nothing to assist us in ascertaining the date of the ballad but what little evidence arises from within." We print the passages to which Percy alludes: "Her father, old king Leir, this while With his two daughters staid; She took from him his chiefest means, For whereas twenty men were wont She gave allowance but to ten, And after scarce to three : Nay, one she thought too much for him: So took she all away, In hope that in her court, good king, "Am I rewarded thus, quoth he, In giving all I have Unto my children, and to beg For what I lately gave? I'll go unto my Gonorell; My second child, I know, Will be more kind and pitiful, "Full fast he hies then to her court; Return'd him answer, That she griev'd Within her kitchen, he should have "And so to England came with speed, To re-possess king Leir, And drive his daughters from their thrones By his Cordelia dear: Where she, true-hearted noble queen, Was in the battle slain : Yet he, good king, in his old days, "But when he heard Cordelia's death, Who dy'd indeed for love Of her dear father, in whose cause "The lords and nobles when they saw The other sisters unto death And being dead their crowns they left Unto the next of kin : Thus have you seen the fall of pride. In Sidney's' Arcadia' there is a chapter entitled 'The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind king, and his kind son, first related by the son, then by the blind father.' This unquestionably furnished the dramatic foundation of Gloster and Edgar. It may be sufficient for us to give the relation of the 'kind son :' "This old man, whom I lead, was lately rightful prince of Paphlagonia, by the hard-hearted ungratefulness of a son of his, deprived not only of his kingdom, but of his sight, the riches which nature grants to the poorest creatures; whereby and by other his unnatural dealings, he hath been driven to such griefs, as even now he would have had me to have led him to the top of this rock, thence to cast himself headlong to death; and so would have had me, who received my life of him, to be the worker of his destruction." PERIOD OF THE ACTION, AND Manners. THE sagacious Mrs. Lenox informs us that "Shakspere has deviated widely from History in the catastrophe of his play;" whereat she is somewhat indignant, for "had Shakspere followed the historian he would not have violated the rules of poetical justice." The antiquarians are as sensitive as the moralists upon this point. Had Shakspere attended to the chronology of the days of king Bladud, and preserved a due regard to the manners of Britain, at the period when Romulus and Remus built Rome "upon the eleventh of the Calends of May," he would not have given us what Douce calls "a plentiful crop of blunders." He would have made no allusions, according to Douce's literal view of the matter, to Turks, or Bedlam beggars, or Childe Roland, or the theatrical moralities, or to Nero. We confess, however, that this inexactitude of the poet does not shock us quite so much as it does the professional detectors of anachronisms,-those who look upon such allusions as "blunders" that may disturb the empire of accuracy and dulness, and consider poetry as properly a sort of ornamented Appendix to a Cyclopædia. We have no desire to regard the symbols by which ideas may be most readily communicated, as the exponents of the things themselves to which they refer. We are willing that a poet, describing events of a purely fabulous character, represented by the narrators of them as belonging to an age to which we cannot attach one precise notion of costume, (we use the word in its large sense,) should employ images that belong to a more recent periodand even to his own time. It is for the same reason that we do not object to see Lear painted with a diadem on his head, and his knights in armour. It is for this reason also, that the gentleman to whom we are indebted for that part of our comment which relates to the dress of Shakspere's characters, has nothing to say on the subject of Lear. We should not much quarrel with any theatrical costume of the tragedy, excepting, perhaps, Garrick's laced coat, and Quin's powdered periwig. We would leave these things to the imaginations of our readers, (whatever stage-managers may do with their audiences,) lest we should fall into some such mistake as that celebrated in the 'Art of Sinking in Poetry :' "A painted vest Prince Vortigern had on, Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won." ['My good biting faulchion. ] SCENE I-King Lear's Palace. ACT I. Enter KENT, GLOSTER, and EDMUnd. Kent. I thought the king had more affected the duke of Albany than Cornwall. Glo. It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom," it appears not which of the dukes he values m st; for qualities b are so weigh'd, that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety. Johnson says, "There is something of obscurity, or inaccuracy, in this preparatory scene. The king has already divided his kingdom, and yet, when he enters, he examines his daughters to discover in what proportions he should divide it." Coleridge has shown that there is no inaccuracy; but that the king, having determined upon the division of his kingdom, institutes the trial of professions in strict accordance with his complicated character. (See Supplementary Notice.) Qualities. In the quartos equalities. eCuriosity, exact scrutiny. d Moiety. In the same way Hotspur calls his third share a moiety. In both these cases it is used for an assigned proportion. (See note on Henry IV., Part I., Act III.. Sc. I.) Kent. Is not this your son, my lord? Glo. His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge: I have so often blush'd to acknowledge him, that now I am braz'd to 't. Kent. I cannot conceive you. Glo. Sir, this young fellow's mother could : whereupon she grew round-wombed; and had indeed, sir, a son for her cradle, ere she had a husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault? Kent. I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper. Glo. But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came somewhat saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair; there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged. Do you know this noble gentleman, Edmund ? To--the quartos into. |