(’said,’ of course, not to the King but to Gloster and perhaps others of the council).  Thus too the plots would be still more closely joined.  Then also we should at once understand the opening of the play.  To Kent’s words, ’I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall,’ Gloster answers, ‘It did always seem so to us.’  Who are the ‘us’ from whom Kent is excluded?  I do not know, for there is no sign that Kent has been absent.  But if Kent, in consequence of his opposition, had fallen out of favour and absented himself from the council, it would be clear.  So, besides, would be the strange suddenness with which, after Gloster’s answer, Kent changes the subject; he would be avoiding, in presence of Gloster’s son, any further reference to a subject on which he and Gloster had differed.  That Kent, I may add, had already the strongest opinion about Goneril and Regan is clear from his extremely bold words (I. i. 165),

     Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
     Upon thy foul disease.

Did Lear remember this phrase when he called Goneril ’a disease that’s in my flesh’ (II. iv. 225)?

Again, the observant reader may have noticed that Goneril is not only represented as the fiercer and more determined of the two sisters but also strikes one as the more sensual.  And with this may be connected one or two somewhat curious points:  Kent’s comparison of Goneril to the figure of Vanity in the Morality plays (II. ii. 38); the Fool’s apparently quite irrelevant remark (though his remarks are scarcely ever so), ‘For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass’ (III. ii. 35); Kent’s reference to Oswald (long before there is any sign of Goneril’s intrigue with Edmund) as ’one that would be a bawd in way of good service’ (II. ii. 20); and Edgar’s words to the corpse of Oswald (IV. vi. 257), also spoken before he knew anything of the intrigue with Edmund,

     I know thee well:  a serviceable villain;
     As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
     As badness would desire.

Perhaps Shakespeare had conceived Goneril as a woman who before her marriage had shown signs of sensual vice; but the distinct indications of this idea were crowded out of his exposition when he came to write it, or, being inserted, were afterwards excised.  I will not go on to hint that Edgar had Oswald in his mind when (III. iv. 87) he described the serving-man who ‘served the lust of his mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her’; and still less that Lear can have had Goneril in his mind in the declamation against lechery referred to in Note S.

I do not mean to imply, by writing this note, that I believe in the hypotheses suggested in it.  On the contrary I think it more probable that the defects referred to arose from carelessness and other causes.  But this is not, to me, certain; and the reader who rejects the hypotheses may be glad to have his attention called to the points which suggested them.