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Lear. What! have his daughters brought him to this pass Could'st thou save nothing? Didst thou give them all?

Act III. Scene 3.

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KING LEAR:

A TRAGEDY,

En Five Acts.

BY WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE,

PRINTED FROM THE ACTING COPY, WITH REMARKS,
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL.

To which are added,

A DESCRIPTION OF THE COSTUME,-CAST OF THE CHARACTERS, ENTRANCES AND EXITS, RELATIVE POSITIONS OF THE PERFORMERS ON THE STAGE, AND THE WHOLE OF THE STAGE

BUSINESS.

As now performed at the

THEATRES ROYAL, LONDON.

EMBELLISHED WITH A FINE WOOD ENGRAVING,
By Mr. WHITE, from a Drawing by Mr. R. CRUIKSHANK.

LONDON:

JOHN CUMBERLAND, 19, LUDGATE HILL.

REMARKS.

KING LEAR is, beyond all comparison, the most affecting tragedy that is to be found in any language. A father, in blind confidence, giving up all to his children-those children requiting his parental kindness with scorn and ingratitude, rebelling against him, turning him out to the wild tempest, to desolation and madness,-present a picture so superhuman and appalling, that nature shrinks from the contemplation of it. Yet Shakspeare, in the conduct of this drama, has displayed such wonderful art, that nothing seems overstrained: the effects, however shocking to humanity, result as naturally from their causes, as in the ordinary affairs of life. The madness of Lear is inevitable, since, after such bitter provocation, it was impossible that reason could any longer hold her seat in a mind so formed of passion and sensibility.

If it be true, with regard to human calamity, that

"He best can paint it who has felt it most,"

What shall we say to the madness of Lear, depicted as it is with the utmost grandeur of thought and expression, but that, as every passion of the soul was familiar to Shakspeare, the most mysterious and terrible of them all had engaged his deepest contemplation? And, whether we consider the ungovernable violence of the unhappy king, in the banishment of Cordelia, and of the faithful Kent; his credulous fondness in giving up all to his daughters, and relying upon their duty and affection for the support and comfort of his old age; his rage and disappointment at finding himself deceived; his bitter imprecations on their ingratitude; his remorse for the ill treatment of her, whose only fault was her sincerity; his madness and death, with all their accompanying horrore-a more overwhelming picture of hu man misery never harrowed up the feelings or crushed the heart.

The prominent feature in the disposition of Lear-a feature characteristic of the rude age in which he is supposed to reign-is impetuo. sity. If he is quick in his affections, he is no less so in his resentments. He is alive to the slightest show of neglect. In the scene where Oswald enters singing, and the physician reminds him that he is entertained with slender ceremony, he replies

"Say'st thou so?

Thou but remember'st me of mine own conception." And, when the ingratitude of Goneril first discovers itself in abating him of half of his train, the dreadful truth bursts full upon his mind, and he exclaims, in an agony of rage and disappointment,→ "Darkness and devils!

Saddle my horses, call my train together.
Degenerate viper! I'll not stay with thee."

In the subsequent scene before the Earl of Gloster's castle, fresh indignities wait the unhappy king. He discovers his man in the stocks, a sight which swells the spleen upward to his heart. He is then reminded of the fiery quality of the duke, at which he loses all patience, and retorts

"My breath and blood!

Fiery? the fiery duke? Tell the hot duke"

The goodness of his nature, however, instantly returns, and he adds-"No, but not yet; may be, he is not well; I beg his pardon, and I'll chide my rashness

That took the indispos'd and sickly fit

For the sound man."

Affronts now follow each other in such rapid succession, he is alternately reproved and browbeaten by his disobedient children. He is asked by Goneril

"What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,

To follow in a house?"

When Regan consummates all, by rejoining

"What need one?"

From this moment he loses all power of self-possession, and abandons himself to despair; yet, even in this pitiable state of helplessness and old age, does he threaten his unnatural offspring with future vengeance:"I will do such things,

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth. '

Till, borne down with unutterable anguish, he rushes out with an exclamation prophetic of the heart-rending scene that immediately fol lows:

"O, gods, I shall go mad!"

The scene where Lear is turned out in the storm, defies all powers of description. We can feel the force of the poet's genius, even to agony but we must inherit a portion of that genius, ere we can describe what we feel. Here are no supernatural agents called forth to deepen the horror of the scene-no furies weaving the web of fate. No

"Iron sleet of arrowy shower

Hurtling through the darken'd air.”

But a dethroned monarch, an unhappy father, in the simple grandeur of unparalleled misery, invoking those "servile ministers," the ele ments, to pour down their extremest vengeance upon his head :—

"You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunberbolts,
Singe my white head."

Here we make a stand, and call upon the genius of every age and nation to produce a parallel to this scene. The most affecting image in all antiquity is Priam supplicating Achilles for the dead body of Hector. But Lear, wandering over the barren heath, amidst storm and tempest, with a broken heart, and a bewildered brain, is so transcendantly sublime and awful, that antiquity must acknowledge the supremacy of Shakspeare, and bow to the immortal. One of the most painful of morbid sensations is the pressure of one idea upon the mind it absorbs every other feeling, aud finds in objects the most opposite and dissimilar some sad resemblance. Hence, amidst the wild uproar of the elements, Lear remembers but the unkindness of his children. The tempest above, is lost in that which rages within his bosom. Every scene calls forth some fresh image of perfidy and ingratitude. In his distraction, he fancies himself standing on the threshold of his palace, and his domestic favourites opposing his entrance by their clamour :

"The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart,-see, they bark at me."

To this, remorse for his unjust treatment of Cordelia adds an additional pang. His anguish is divided between he remembrance of his daughters' inhumanity and his own.

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