and the method of handling it, may have been due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very reverse of pessimistic.  Whether the total impression of King Lear can be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the text.]

[Footnote 154:  A Study of Shakespeare, pp. 171, 172.]

[Footnote 155:  A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological document but as a work of art,—­an aesthetic flaw.  I add the word ‘considerable’ because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a subordinate aspect of things.]

[Footnote 156:  Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists.  A tragedy like the Antigone stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe.  A drama like the Philoctetes is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a play like Cymbeline.  A drama like the Agamemnon or the Prometheus Vinctus answers to no Shakespearean form of play.  It is not a self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy.  If the trilogy is considered as a unit, it answers not to Hamlet but to Cymbeline.  If the part is considered as a whole, it answers to Hamlet, but may then be open to serious criticism.  Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with the complete triumph of the worse side:  the Agamemnon and Prometheus, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to remind the reader that, in point of ‘self-containedness,’ there is a difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some of the historical.]]

[Footnote 157:  I leave it to better authorities to say how far these remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of ‘justice’ may be used there.]

LECTURE VIII

KING LEAR

We have now to look at the characters in King Lear; and I propose to consider them to some extent from the point of view indicated at the close of the last lecture, partly because we have so far been regarding the tragedy mainly from an opposite point of view, and partly because these characters are so numerous that it would not be possible within our limits to examine them fully.

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