I spoke of Lear’s ‘recovery,’ but the word is too strong.  The Lear of the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled.  The speech just quoted is followed by a sudden flash of the old passionate nature, reminding us most pathetically of Lear’s efforts, just before his madness, to restrain his tears: 

                           Wipe thine eyes: 
     The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
     Ere they shall make us weep:  we’ll see ’em starve first.

And this weakness is still more pathetically shown in the blindness of the old King to his position now that he and Cordelia are made prisoners.  It is evident that Cordelia knows well what mercy her father is likely to receive from her sisters; that is the reason of her weeping.  But he does not understand her tears; it never crosses his mind that they have anything more than imprisonment to fear.  And what is that to them?  They have made that sacrifice, and all is well: 

                          Have I caught thee? 
     He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
     And fire us hence like foxes.

This blindness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they will be parted; but it is also comforting.  And we find the same mingling of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the story.  If to the reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is not so with Lear himself.  His shattered mind passes from the first transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia’s body and holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the cause of these transports.  This continues so long as he can converse with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child’s corpse, to an agony which at once breaks his heart.  And, finally, though he is killed by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of pain but of ecstasy.  Suddenly, with a cry represented in the oldest text by a four-times repeated ‘O,’ he exclaims: 

Do you see this?  Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

These are the last words of Lear.  He is sure, at last, that she lives:  and what had he said when he was still in doubt?

                     She lives! if it be so,
     It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
     That ever I have felt!

To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a culmination of pain:  but, if it brings only that, I believe we are false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear’s last accents and gestures and look, an unbearable joy.[162]