longer than the Fifth (about fourteen columns of the Globe edition against about eight and a half), and Spedding’s change would give the Fourth nearly sixteen columns, and the Fifth less than seven. (3) Spedding’s proposal requires a much greater alteration in the existing text than he supposed.  It does not simply shift the division of the two Acts, it requires the disappearance and re-entrance of the blind Gloster.  Gloster, as the text stands, is alone on the stage while the battle is being fought at a distance, and the reference to the tree shows that he was on the main or lower stage.  The main stage had no front curtain; and therefore, if Act IV. is to end where Spedding wished it to end, Gloster must go off unaided at its close, and come on again unaided for Act V. And this means that the whole arrangement of the present Act V. Sc. ii. must be changed.  If Spedding had been aware of this it is not likely that he would have broached his theory.[277]

It is curious that he does not allude to the one circumstance which throws some little suspicion on the existing text.  I mean the contradiction between Edgar’s statement that, if ever he returns to his father again, he will bring him comfort, and the fact that immediately afterwards he returns to bring him discomfort.  It is possible to explain this psychologically, of course, but the passage is not one in which we should expect psychological subtlety.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 276:  Where did Spedding find this?  I find no trace of it, and surely Edgar would not have risked his life in the battle, when he had, in case of defeat, to appear and fight Edmund.  He does not appear ‘armed,’ according to the Folio, till V. iii. 117.]

[Footnote 277:  Spedding supposed that there was a front curtain, and this idea, coming down from Malone and Collier, is still found in English works of authority.  But it may be stated without hesitation that there is no positive evidence at all for the existence of such a curtain, and abundant evidence against it.]

NOTE Y.

SOME DIFFICULT PASSAGES IN KING LEAR.

The following are notes on some passages where I have not been able to accept any of the current interpretations, or on which I wish to express an opinion or represent a little-known view.

1. Kent’s soliloquy at the end of II. ii.

(a) In this speech the application of the words ’Nothing, almost sees miracles but misery’ seems not to have been understood.  The ‘misery’ is surely not that of Kent but that of Lear, who has come ’out of heaven’s benediction to the warm sun,’ i.e. to misery.  This, says Kent, is just the situation where something like miraculous help may be looked for; and he finds the sign of it in the fact that a letter from Cordelia has just reached him; for his course since his banishment has been so obscured that it is only by the rarest good fortune (something like a miracle) that Cordelia has got intelligence of it.  We may suppose that this intelligence came from one of Albany’s or Cornwall’s servants, some of whom are, he says (III. i. 23),