Page:Shakespearean Tragedy (1912).djvu/464

 points: Kent’s comparison of Goneril to the figure of Vanity in the Morality plays ( ii. 38); the Fool’s apparently quite irrelevant remark (though his remarks are scarcely ever so), ‘For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass’ ( ii. 35); Kent’s reference to Oswald (long before there is any sign of Goneril’s intrigue with Edmund) as ‘one that would be a bawd in way of good service’ ( ii. 20); and Edgar’s words to the corpse of Oswald ( vi. 257), also spoken before he knew anything of the intrigue with Edmund,

Perhaps Shakespeare had conceived Goneril as a woman who before her marriage had shown signs of sensual vice; but the distinct indications of this idea were crowded out of his exposition when he came to write it, or, being inserted, were afterwards excised. I will not go on to hint that Edgar had Oswald in his mind when ( iv. 87) he described the servingman who ‘served the lust of his mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her’; and still less that Lear can have had Goneril in his mind in the declamation against lechery referred to in Note S.

I do not mean to imply, by writing this note, that I believe in the hypotheses suggested in it. On the contrary I think it more probable that the defects referred to arose from carelessness and other causes. But this is not, to me, certain; and the reader who rejects the hypotheses may be glad to have his attention called to the points which suggested them.

 

I have referred in the text to the obscurity of the play on this subject, and I will set out the movements here.

When Lear is ill-treated by Goneril his first thought is to seek refuge with Regan ( iv. 274 f., 327 f.). Goneril, accord-