therefore, it has been substituted for some genuine speech; and surely that is a supposition not to be entertained except under compulsion. (3) There is no such compulsion in the speech.  It is not very good, no doubt; but the use of rhymed and somewhat antithetic lines in a gnomic passage is quite in Shakespeare’s manner, more in his manner than, for example, the rhymed passages in I. i. 183-190, 257-269, 281-4, which nobody doubts; quite like many places in All’s Well, or the concluding lines of King Lear itself. (4) The lines are in spirit of one kind with Edgar’s fine lines at the beginning of Act IV. (5) Some of them, as Delius observes, emphasize the parallelism between the stories of Lear and Gloster. (6) The fact that the Folio omits the lines is, of course, nothing against them.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 270:  I ignore them partly because they are not significant for the present purpose, but mainly because it is impossible to accept the division of battle-scenes in our modern texts, while to depart from it is to introduce intolerable inconvenience in reference.  The only proper plan in Elizabethan drama is to consider a scene ended as soon as no person is left on the stage, and to pay no regard to the question of locality,—­a question theatrically insignificant and undetermined in most scenes of an Elizabethan play, in consequence of the absence of movable scenery.  In dealing with battles the modern editors seem to have gone on the principle (which they could not possibly apply generally) that, so long as the place is not changed, you have only one scene.  Hence in Macbeth, Act V., they have included in their Scene vii. three distinct scenes; yet in Antony and Cleopatra, Act III., following the right division for a wrong reason, they have two scenes (viii. and ix.), each less than four lines long.]

[Footnote 271:  One of these (V. i.) is not marked as such, but it is evident that the last line and a half form a soliloquy of one remaining character, just as much as some of the soliloquies marked as such in other plays.]

[Footnote 272:  According to modern editions, eight, Act II., scene ii., being an instance.  But it is quite ridiculous to reckon as three scenes what are marked as scenes ii., iii., iv.  Kent is on the lower stage the whole time, Edgar in the so-called scene iii. being on the upper stage or balcony.  The editors were misled by their ignorance of the stage arrangements.]

[Footnote 273:  Perhaps three, for V. iii. is perhaps an instance, though not so marked.]

NOTE W.

THE STAGING OF THE SCENE OF LEAR’S REUNION WITH CORDELIA.

As Koppel has shown, the usual modern stage-directions[274] for this scene (IV. vii.) are utterly wrong and do what they can to defeat the poet’s purpose.