Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear! 
     Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
     To make this creature fruitful! 
     Into her womb convey sterility! 
     Dry up in her the organs of increase;
     And from her derogate body never spring
     A babe to honour her!  If she must teem,
     Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
     And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! 
     Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
     With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
     Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
     To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
     How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
     To have a thankless child!

The question is not whether Goneril deserves these appalling imprecations, but what they tell us about Lear.  They show that, although he has already recognised his injustice towards Cordelia, is secretly blaming himself, and is endeavouring to do better, the disposition from which his first error sprang is still unchanged.  And it is precisely the disposition to give rise, in evil surroundings, to calamities dreadful but at the same time tragic, because due in some measure to the person who endures them.

The perception of this connection, if it is not lost as the play advances, does not at all diminish our pity for Lear, but it makes it impossible for us permanently to regard the world displayed in this tragedy as subject to a mere arbitrary or malicious power.  It makes us feel that this world is so far at least a rational and a moral order, that there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of strict connection between act and consequence.  It is, so far, the world of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.

But there is another aspect of Lear’s story, the influence of which modifies, in a way quite different and more peculiar to this tragedy, the impressions called pessimistic and even this impression of law.  There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than Shakespeare’s exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear’s nature.  The occasional recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it.  The old King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore and upward, constrains himself to practise a self-control and patience so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in repentance for his injustice to the Fool’s beloved mistress, tolerates incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the rage of the storm awakes a power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even that of Othello’s anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy,