these hard hearts?’—­the strain of thought which appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play.  We seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or atrophied or only incipient.  This, of course, is a tendency which produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare’s genius, which was in the highest degree concrete.  No doubt in the main we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius.  The Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare’s mind to move in a world of ‘Platonic’ ideas;[142] and, while it would be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or allegory in King Lear, it does appear to disclose a mode of imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in the Fairy Queen.

This same tendency shows itself in King Lear in other forms.  To it is due the idea of monstrosity—­of beings, actions, states of mind, which appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea, which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with unusual frequency in King Lear, for instance in the lines: 

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!

or in the exclamation,

                               Filial ingratitude! 
     Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
     For lifting food to’t?

It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in horror: 

Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame. 
Be-monster not thy feature.  Were’t my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones:  howe’er thou art a fiend,
A woman’s shape doth shield thee.[143]

It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent’s, as he listens to the description of Cordelia’s grief: 

                             It is the stars,
     The stars above us, govern our conditions;
     Else one self mate and mate could not beget
     Such different issues.

(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly different products.)