most of Shakespeare’s heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the poet who made them.  Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament—­the first of Shakespeare’s heroes who is so.  And a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen stumbling against the altar of Nemesis.  Our consciousness that the decay of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic nexus which binds together his error and his calamities.

The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he often loses the memory of it as the play advances.  But this is not so, I think, with the repetition of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.  Here the daughter excites so much detestation, and the father so much sympathy, that we often fail to receive the due impression of his violence.  There is not here, of course, the injustice of his rejection of Cordelia, but there is precisely the same [Greek:  hubris].  This had been shown most strikingly in the first scene when, immediately upon the apparently cold words of Cordelia, ‘So young, my lord, and true,’ there comes this dreadful answer: 

     Let it be so; thy truth then be thy dower. 
     For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
     The mysteries of Hecate and the night;
     By all the operation of the orbs
     From whom we do exist and cease to be;
     Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
     Propinquity and property of blood,
     And as a stranger to my heart and me
     Hold thee from this for ever.  The barbarous Scythian,
     Or he that makes his generation messes
     To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
     Be as well neighbour’d, pitied and relieved,
     As thou my sometime daughter.

Now the dramatic effect of this passage is exactly, and doubtless intentionally, repeated in the curse pronounced against Goneril.  This does not come after the daughters have openly and wholly turned against their father.  Up to the moment of its utterance Goneril has done no more than to require him ‘a little to disquantity’ and reform his train of knights.  Certainly her manner and spirit in making this demand are hateful, and probably her accusations against the knights are false; and we should expect from any father in Lear’s position passionate distress and indignation.  But surely the famous words which form Lear’s immediate reply were meant to be nothing short of frightful: