Albany greets the news of Cornwall’s death with the exclamation,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge;
and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,
Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares
Make instruments to plague us,
and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from King Lear an impression which is at least as near of kin to the Divine Comedy as to Othello.
3
For Dante that which is recorded in the Divine Comedy was the justice and love of God. What did King Lear record for Shakespeare? Something, it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly bad. What is Iago’s malignity against an envied stranger compared with the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What
- ↑ ‘justice,’ Qq.
