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RV 282 (Rh) and the ‘hideous rashness’ of his persistence in dividing the kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the presence of force as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of the tragic. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious, of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello and indeed most of Shakespeare’s heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament—the first of Shakespeare’s heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent has produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic nexus which binds together his error and his calamities.

The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he often loses the memory of it as the play advances. But this is not so, I think, with the repetition of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril. Here the daughter excites so much detestation, and the father so much sympathy, that we often fail to receive the due impression of his violence. There is not here, of course, the injustice of his rejection of Cordelia, but there is precisely the same. This had been shown most strikingly in the first scene when, immediately upon the apparently cold words of Cordelia, ‘So young, my lord, and true,’ there comes this dreadful answer: