LECTURE VII

KING LEAR

King Lear has again and again been described as Shakespeare’s greatest work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him best would pronounce for keeping King Lear.

Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four.  The ‘general reader’ reads it less often than the others, and, though he acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain distaste.  It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the least successful there.  And when we look back on its history we find a curious fact.  Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate altered King Lear for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia’s lover.  From that time Shakespeare’s tragedy in its original form was never seen on the stage for a century and a half.  Betterton acted Tate’s version; Garrick acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it.  Kemble acted it, Kean acted it.  In 1823 Kean, ’stimulated by Hazlitt’s remonstrances and Charles Lamb’s essays,’ restored the original tragic ending.  At last, in 1838, Macready returned to Shakespeare’s text throughout.

What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts?  Are the lovers of Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong?  I venture to doubt it.  When I read King Lear two impressions are left on my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. King Lear seems to me Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play.  And I find that I tend to consider it from two rather different points of view.  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.

This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the affinities and the probable chronological position of King Lear.  It is allied with two tragedies, Othello and Timon of Athens; and these two tragedies are utterly unlike.[123] Othello was probably composed about 1604, and King Lear about 1605; and though there is a somewhat marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances between the two.  The most important