added, to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.[1] His sufferings, again, like Lear’s, purify and enlighten him: he dies a better and wiser man than he showed himself at first. They even learn the same lesson, and Gloster’s repetition (noticed and blamed by Johnson) of the thought in a famous speech of Lear’s is surely intentional.[2] And, finally, Gloster dies almost as Lear dies. Edgar reveals himself to him and asks his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear’s):
Alack, too weak the conflict to support—
’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst smilingly.
So far, the resemblance of the two stories, and also of the ways in which their painful effect is modified, is curiously close. And in character too Gloster is, like his master, affectionate,[3] credulous
- ↑ The connection of these sufferings with the sin of earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon our notice by the levity of Gloster’s own reference to the subject in the first scene, and by Edgar’s often quoted words ‘The gods are just,’ etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):
Fool. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher’s heart; a small spark, all the rest on’s body cold. Look, here comes a walking fire. [Enter Gloster with a torch.]
Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a point some dozen lines later.
- ↑ The passages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff. and IV. i. 67 ff.):
Lear. Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens just.Glo. Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens’ plagues
Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched
Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough. - ↑ Schmidt’s idea—based partly on the omission from the Folios at I. ii. 103 (see Furness’ Variorum) of the words ‘To his father that so
