Before I turn to the other side of the subject I will refer to one more characteristic of this play which is dramatically disadvantageous.  In Shakespeare’s dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact locality of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often unanswerable; but, as a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the persons live and what their journeys are.  The text makes this plain, for example, almost throughout Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth; and the imagination is therefore untroubled.  But in King Lear the indications are so scanty that the reader’s mind is left not seldom both vague and bewildered.  Nothing enables us to imagine whereabouts in Britain Lear’s palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany lives.  In referring to the dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy forests and plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he studiously avoids proper names.  The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the absence of information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find, from the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a surname, that he lives at Gloster (I. v. 1).[137] This seems likely to be also the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is patron.  But no:  it is a night’s journey from Cornwall’s ‘house’ to Gloster’s, and Gloster’s is in the middle of an uninhabited heath.[138] Here, for the purpose of the crisis, nearly all the persons assemble, but they do so in a manner which no casual spectator or reader could follow.  Afterwards they all drift towards Dover for the purpose of the catastrophe; but again the localities and movements are unusually indefinite.  And this indefiniteness is found in smaller matters.  One cannot help asking, for example, and yet one feels one had better not ask, where that ‘lodging’ of Edmund’s can be, in which he hides Edgar from his father, and whether Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree (in a district where ‘for many miles about there’s scarce a bush’) to his father’s castle in order to soliloquise (II. iii.):—­for the favourite stage-direction, ‘a wood’ (which is more than ’a bush’), however convenient to imagination, is scarcely compatible with the presence of Kent asleep in the stocks.[139] Something of the confusion which bewilders the reader’s mind in King Lear recurs in Antony and Cleopatra, the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies; but there it is due not so much to the absence or vagueness of the indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing journeys over thousands of miles.  Shakespeare could not help himself in the Roman play:  in King Lear he did not choose to help himself, perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.

From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must be familiar to many readers of King Lear.  It is far more difficult to retrace in memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth.  The outline is of course quite clear; anyone could write an ‘argument’ of the play.  But when an attempt is made to fill in the detail, it issues sooner or later in confusion even with readers whose dramatic memory is unusually strong.[140]