Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners: / with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare; on a Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris dance.

by Francis Douce

KING LEAR.

We have here a plentiful crop of blunders. Kent talks, like a good Protestant, of eating no fish; and Gloster, of not standing in need of spectacles. We have Turks, Bedlam beggars, child Roland, Saint Withold, a Marshal of France, steeples, dollars, paper, holy water, and the French disease. There is an allusion to the old theatrical moralities; and Nero, who did not live till several hundred years after Lear, is mentioned by Edgar as an angler in the lake of darkness.