"King Lear." He defends Shakespeare in words that are a classic of criticism:

Tate has put his hook into the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!-as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, -the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,-why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station, as if at his years, and with his experience, anything was left but to die.

To our feeling Shakespeare was wiser than those who thought to improve upon him. The disregard of poetic justice in this thrilling play is the very source of its power. To see Lear restored and happy after his awful agonies is not so appropriate and not so impressive as to see him die, stretched out upon the rack of this tough world. Cordelia living and crowned is not so thrillingly beautiful as Cordelia faithful unto death. Fitting it is, if a daughter honor her father, that her days be long in the land; but to honor him as the martyrs honored their God, to die in doing it, this is still more noble and pathetic.

III. CONTRAST IN "KING LEAR"

Contrast is an effect fundamental to drama. The dramas of the Greeks observed strictly what Professor Moulton terms the unity of tone. A play was entirely Cited by Furness, p. 421.

serious or entirely comic. Yet even here contrast was not neglected. In the "Electra" of Sophocles, the steel-like hardness of Electra toward her wicked mother Clytemnestra is powerfully contrasted with her loving tenderness toward her brother Orestes.

Shakespeare mingles freely the serious and the comic. In "Macbeth" the horrors of Duncan's murder are followed by the ribald jesting of the drunken porter. This may be called successive contrast. In "King Lear," however, this dramatic effect is managed more subtly. Here we have mingled contrast. The streams of tragedy and of comedy flow on together. The jesting Fool babbles on, while the mind and the heart of Lear are both breaking. This is life itself, in which the mingled strands of jest and earnest cannot be disentangled. Smiles shine through tears, and tears darken smiles.

IV. THE FOOL

There is a world of pathos in that darling fellow, the faithful Fool. The position of court Fool was usually given to some one weak of body as well as quick of wit. It was half a charity, bestowed upon one not fully able to make a living for himself in ordinary ways. Lear's Fool conforms to this type. He had never been looked upon as a real man. His office was but to amuse the King's idle hours, to enliven banquets, to quicken the dull brains of courtiers at the king's feasts. Foaming wine, brilliant lights, lords and ladies, these made the setting in which the Fool was expected to play his part. For the serious things of life he was never intended. What is he doing upon this naked heath, in the inky blackness of this awful night, amid

Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans or roaring wind and rain?

Lear's name for him, "boy," and his frail body shivering with the cold tell us that he cannot long endure such exposure. The cap and bells and the motley suit look strangely out of place. But in this darkest night of Lear's life, when he has rushed out into the storm to escape from cruel children, when all the forces of nature have joined with those pernicious daughters in active league against him, when all others seem to have forsaken him—for even Kent is gone for the time—here is the little Fool, laboring to outjest his master's heart-struck injuries.

Many contrasts are presented by this true-hearted boy. There is the contrast between his faithfulness and the abandonment of Lear by others, between his feeble form and the power of the tempest, also between the weakness of his body and the strength of his affection. His office, dress, gesture, and grimaces contrast sharply with his actual rôle of faithful service. In an apt phrase, Hudson calls him "the soul of pathos in a sort of comic masquerade." Most striking of all is the contrast between the gibes of the jester and his true, true love. Jesting is his trade; he cannot talk otherwise, and his master would not have him. And so he rambles on,-faithful foolery, pathetic jesting, "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" pouring forth from a soul filled with Christ-like compassion and self-forgetfulness.

In the strange masquerade of life the least has become the greatest. The courtiers are gone. Until Kent appears, it is only the jester who seems to feel the seriousness of life and love and duty. Only the Fool shows the higher wisdom of utter fidelity. This boy is the true man, this cipher the most real quantity in the life of Lear as his mind slowly breaks into madness. The first have become last, and the last is first.

Shakespeare had introduced a Fool into more than one play before "King Lear," and always with good effect; but in no other play has the character the power shown here. There is nothing in the sources from which Shakespeare may have taken the story which could suggest this character. It is a striking fact that in no play written after this was a Fool made prominent. "The force of nature could no farther go."

There has been much speculation concerning the fate of the Fool. We are told that he pined away after Cordelia went into France. Lear, at the verge of madness, notes the suffering of his faithful friend. "How dost, my boy? art cold?" When the Fool declares, “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen," we forget the jester in the sufferer. His last spoken words, "And I'll go to bed at noon," mean that grief and exposure are bringing death to the breaking heart and frail body.

Why did Shakespeare choose to have the Fool disappear at this point. Undoubtedly because his jocular utterances would jar upon us after Lear's mind has completely given way. Jesting is the only art that he knows, and the time for jesting has passed. "Even Shakespeare," says" White, "could not make sport with the great primal elements of woe. And so the poor Fool sought the little corner where he slept the last time." 1

Although the grounds just indicated for having the Fool disappear at this point are clear and sufficient, there is plausibility in the acute suggestion of Professor Brandl of Berlin that another reason why the jester disappears from the play is that "the same boy actor originally took

Richard Grant White, Studies in Shakespeare, Boston, 6th ed., 1893, p. 232.

the parts of both the Fool and Cordelia." The slight "boy" whom Lear loved and the "little seeming substance" of Cordelia might well be personated by the same youth. It is noteworthy that, when Macready restored Shakespeare's text to the stage in 1838, he was much troubled about the part of the Fool. He says in his Diary: “I described the sort of fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced, halfidiot-looking boy that he should be, and stated my belief that it never could be acted. Bartley observed that a woman should play it. I caught at the idea, and instantly exclaimed: 'Miss P. Horton is the very person.' I was delighted at the thought."

2

The following from Professor Bradley's study of the play is especially interesting:

One can almost imagine that Shakespeare, going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the Clown in "Twelfth Night" in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without Hamlet as miss him.''

I take this from the edition of the play in The New Hudson Shakespeare, Ginn & Co., 1911, p. xc. No reference is given. 'The Diaries of William Charles Macready, London, 1912, Vol. I, p. 438.

3

A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2d ed., London, 1905, p. 311.