Here, too, in what Edgar says of himself, is the moral of all passion: it is manifestly Shakespeare's view of himself:
“A most poor man, made tame to Fortune's blows,
Who by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows
Am pregnant to good pity.”
Then we find the supreme phrase—perhaps the finest ever written:
“Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.”
Shakespeare speaks through Lear in the last acts as plainly as through Edgar. In the third scene of the fifth act Lear talks to Cordelia in the very words Shakespeare gave to the saint Henry VI. at the beginning of his career. Compare the extracts on pages 118-9 with the following passage, and you will see the similarity and the astounding growth in his art.
“... Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; ...”
More characteristic still of Shakespeare is the fact that when Lear is at his bitterest in the fourth act, he shows the erotic mania which is the source of all Shakespeare's bitterness and misery; but which is utterly out of place in Lear. The reader will mark how “adultery” is dragged in:
“... Ay, every inch a king:
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.
I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:
The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; ...
...
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends'; ...”
Thus Lear raves for a whole page: Shakespeare on his hobby: in the same erotic spirit he makes both Goneril and Regan lust after Edmund.
The note of this tragedy is Shakespeare's understanding of his insane blind trust in men; but the passion of it springs from erotic mania and from the consciousness that he is too old for love's lists. Perhaps his imagination never carried him higher than when Lear appeals to the heavens because they too are old: