it would be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or allegory in King Lear, it does appear to disclose a mode of imagination, not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in the Fairy Queen.
This same tendency shows itself in King Lear in other forms. To it is due the idea of monstrosity—of beings, actions, states of mind, which appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea, which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with unusual frequency in King Lear, for instance in the lines:
More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!
or in the exclamation,
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to’t?
It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in horror:
Bemonster not thy feature. Were’t my fitness
To let these hands obey, my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones: howe’er thou art a fiend,
A woman’s shape doth shield thee.[1]
- ↑ The monstrosity here is a being with a woman’s body and a fiend’s soul. For the interpretation of the lines see Note Y.
Shakespeare’s Poems. Perhaps both writers overstate, and Simpson’s interpretations are often forced or arbitrary, but his book is valuable and ought not to remain out of print.
