What are we to say of the world which contains these five beings, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald?  I have tried to answer this question in our first lecture; for in its representation of evil King Lear differs from the other tragedies only in degree and manner.  It is the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and because so little good is mingled with their evil.  The effect is therefore more startling than elsewhere; it is even appalling.  But in substance it is the same as elsewhere; and accordingly, although it may be useful to recall here our previous discussion, I will do so only by the briefest statement.

On the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in profusion.  Further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive.  They are not unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around them.  All this is undeniable fact.

On the other hand this evil is merely destructive:  it founds nothing, and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite.  It is also self-destructive:  it sets these beings at enmity; they can scarcely unite against a common and pressing danger; if it were averted they would be at each other’s throats in a moment; the sisters do not even wait till it is past.  Finally, these beings, all five of them, are dead a few weeks after we see them first; three at least die young; the outburst of their evil is fatal to them.  These also are undeniable facts; and, in face of them, it seems odd to describe King Lear as ’a play in which the wicked prosper’ (Johnson).

Thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to it.  And this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered, partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the better characters.  Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst forms, to be a poison.  The world reacts against it violently, and, in the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.

If we ask why the world should generate that which convulses and wastes it, the tragedy gives no answer, and we are trying to go beyond tragedy in seeking one.  But the world, in this tragic picture, is convulsed by evil, and rejects it.

4

And if here there is ‘very Night herself,’ she comes ’with stars in her raiment.’  Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool—­these form a group not less remarkable than that which we have just left.  There is in the world of King Lear the same abundance of extreme good as of extreme evil.  It generates in profusion self-less devotion and unconquerable love.  And the strange thing is that neither Shakespeare