Let the great gods,
     That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
     Find out their enemies now.  Tremble, thou wretch,
     That hast within thee undivulged crimes....

At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice: 

           Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just;

and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV. i. 67 ff.).  Gloster again, thinking of the cruelty of Lear’s daughters, breaks out,

                       but I shall see
     The winged vengeance overtake such children.

The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.  One cries,

I’ll never care what wickedness I do,
If this man come to good;

and another,

if she live long,
And in the end meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.

Albany greets the news of Cornwall’s death with the exclamation,

This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge;

and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,

This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
Touches us not with pity.

Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares

     The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
     Make instruments to plague us,

and Edmund himself assents.  Almost throughout the latter half of the drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair.  And the influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from King Lear an impression which is at least as near of kin to the Divine Comedy as to Othello.

3

For Dante that which is recorded in the Divine Comedy was the justice and love of God.  What did King Lear record for Shakespeare?  Something, it would seem, very different.  This is certainly the most terrible picture that Shakespeare painted of the world.  In no other of his tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly bad.  What is Iago’s malignity against an envied stranger compared with the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear?  What are the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?  Much too that we have already observed—­the repetition of the main theme in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with