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 which has the slightest authority, for ‘Lear on a bed asleep’ was never heard of till Capell proposed it. The ruinous change of the staging was probably suggested by the version of that unhappy Tate.

Of course the chair arrangement is primitive, but the Elizabethans did not care about such things. What they cared for was dramatic effect.

 

I found my impression of the extraordinary ineffectiveness of this battle (p. 255) confirmed by a paper of James Spedding (New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1877, or Furness’s King Lear, p. 312 f.); but his opinion that this is the one technical defect in King Lear seems certainly incorrect, and his view that this defect is not due to Shakespeare himself will not, I think, bear scrutiny.

To make Spedding’s view quite clear I may remind the reader that in the preceding scene the two British armies, that of Edmund and Regan, and that of Albany and Goneril, have entered with drum and colours, and have departed. Scene ii. is as follows (Globe):

