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RV 309 (Rh) care of the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate. We lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his task is nearly done. Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him saying,

His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about Edgar’s neck; bellows out as he’d burst heaven (how like him!);

and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his voice:

This desire possesses him wholly. When the bodies of Goneril and Regan are brought in he asks merely, ‘Alack, why thus?’ How can he care? He is waiting for one thing alone. He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his failure to receive it. It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he murmurs, as his master dies, ‘Break, heart, I prithee, break!’ He puts aside Albany’s invitation to take part in the government; his task is over:

Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his desire to follow his dead lord,