[Footnote 147:  With this compare the following lines in the great speech on ‘degree’ in Troilus and Cressida, I. iii.: 

     Take but degree away, untune that string,
     And, hark, what discord follows!  Each thing meets
     In mere oppugnancy:  the bounded waters
     Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
     And make a sop of all this solid globe: 
     Strength should be lord of imbecility,
     And the rude son should strike his father dead: 
     Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
     Between whose endless jar justice resides,
     Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 
     Then everything includes itself in power,
     Power into will, will into appetite;
     And appetite, an universal wolf,
     So doubly seconded with will and power,
     Must make perforce an universal prey,
     And last eat up himself.]

[Footnote 148:  Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes.  He may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case have written to satisfy his own imagination.  I have taken no notice of the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear.  The matter is too huge, and too strictly poetic, for analysis.  I may observe that in our present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect.  Shakespeare, as we saw (p. 49), interposed between them short scenes of much lower tone.]

[Footnote 149:  ‘justice,’ Qq.]

[Footnote 150:  =approve.]

[Footnote 151:  The direction ‘Storm and tempest’ at the end of this speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.]

[Footnote 152:  The gods are mentioned many times in King Lear, but ‘God’ only here (V. ii. 16).]

[Footnote 153:  The whole question how far Shakespeare’s works represent his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it only as it concerns the ‘tragic period.’

There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less merry or sunny.  He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Timon, Macbeth, is correct, these tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and King Lear and Timon lie at the nadir.  He wrote also in these years (probably