To dwell on the pathos of Lear’s last speech would be an impertinence, but I may add a remark on the speech from the literary point of view.  In the simplicity of its language, which consists almost wholly of monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the by-standers.  The fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not the sole cause.  The language is more than simple, it is familiar.  And this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments, already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such as ’The little dogs and all....’).  We feel in them the loss of power to sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has become nothingness to him, and that what remains is ‘the thing itself,’ the soul in its bare greatness.  Hence also it is that two lines in this last speech show, better perhaps than any other passage of poetry, one of the qualities we have in mind when we distinguish poetry as ‘romantic.’  Nothing like Hamlet’s mysterious sigh ‘The rest is silence,’ nothing like Othello’s memories of his life of marvel and achievement, was possible to Lear.  Those last thoughts are romantic in their strangeness:  Lear’s five-times repeated ‘Never,’ in which the simplest and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till the heart breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out of this one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which came infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments.  But the familiarity, boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by the next line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily relief.  The imagination that produced Lear’s curse or his defiance of the storm may be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek the imagination that could venture to follow that cry of ‘Never’ with such a phrase as ‘undo this button,’ and yet could leave us on the topmost peaks of poetry?[163]

2

Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy.  The parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental.  Both are old white-haired men (III. vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers, with children comparatively young.  Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and his life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and healed by the child whom he has wronged.  His sufferings, like Lear’s, are partly traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may be added, to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.[164] His sufferings, again, like Lear’s, purify and enlighten him:  he dies a better and wiser man than he showed himself at first.  They even learn the same lesson, and Gloster’s repetition (noticed and blamed by Johnson) of the thought in a famous speech of Lear’s is surely intentional.[165] And, finally, Gloster dies almost as Lear dies.  Edgar reveals himself to him and asks his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear’s):