The presence in King Lear of so large a number of characters in whom love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not merely inspire in us emotion of unusual strength, but they also stir the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago (and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare’s) forces us to ask, but in King Lear it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to us that the author himself is asking this question. ‘Then let them anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’—the strain of thought which appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare’s genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare’s mind to move in a world of ‘Platonic’ ideas;[1] and, while
- ↑ How prevalent these are is not recognised by readers familiar only with English poetry. See Simpson’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1868) and Mr. Wyndham’s edition of
