Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/151

136 from the materials of an insane prince: Don Carlos, who in this country and in private station, might have found his way to the criminal wards at Bethlem, to whom, in fact, the sharp remedy of assassination had to be applied, as to Muscovite Paul.

Why not ? except that poetry and

history are rather different things. This fact of royalty in Lear; that he has been eighty years and more a prince and king, that he is not only

despotic in authority but in disposition, that his will can tolerate no question, no hindrance ; this, if not the pri

mary cause of his lunacy, gives colour and form to it. He strives to abdicate, but cannot ; even madness cannot

dethrone him ; authority is stamped legibly on his brow ;

he is not alone a mad man but a mad king) Unhappy king, what was thy preparation for thy crown of sorrows, thy sceptre of woe

Unlimited authority; that is,

isolation. To have no equals, that is to say, no friends; to be flattered to the face, and told that there were gray hairs

in the beard before the black ones were there, plied with lies from early youth, (for this teaches that Lear was a king before he wore a beard), and therefore to be set on a pedestal apart from his kind, even from his own flesh

and blood, until all capacity to distinguish truth from false hood, affection from hypocrisy is lost, this is thy preparation.

(Half a century of despotic power, yielded by a mortal of rash and headstrong temper, and with vivid poetic imagi nation, may well produce habitudes of mind to which any opposition will appear unnatural and monstrous as if the laws of nature were reversed, to which the incredible fact can

be accepted only with astonishment and unbounded ragey But Lear's mind is conditioned by extreme age as well as by despotism ; age which too often makes men selfish, unsympathising, and unimpressible ; age, which in some “hardens the heart as the blood ceases to run, and