Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
     Teems and feeds all,

turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon themselves.  Surely something not less, but much more, than these helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes; and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination.  Here then is Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist Shakespeare.[148]

And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view.  Its purpose is not merely dramatic.  This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have expected in a world so wild and monstrous.  It is as if Shakespeare said to us:  ’Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here?  Were you beginning to dream that?  I will show you it is not so.’

I come to a last point.  As we contemplate this world, the question presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and overrules them?  And in King Lear this question is not left to us to ask, it is raised by the characters themselves.  References to religious or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in Shakespeare’s tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays.  He introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds.  They answer it in their turn:  Kent, for instance: 

                           It is the stars,
     The stars above us, govern our condition: 

Edmund: 

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound: 

and again,

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—­often the surfeit of our own behaviour—­we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on: 

Gloster: 

     As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
     They kill us for their sport;

Edgar: 

     Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
     Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.

Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.  And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought, often repeated, of divine retribution.  To Lear at one moment the storm seems the messenger of heaven: