For the end of all things seems to have come when we see the ruin of the moral world—when he who is noble and trustful like Lear is rewarded with ingratitude and hate; when he who is honest and brave like Kent is punished with dishonour; when he who is merciful like Gloucester, taking the suffering and injured under his roof, has the loss of his eyes for his reward; when he who is noble and faithful like Edgar must wander about in the semblance of a maniac, with a rag round his loins; when, finally, she who is the living emblem of womanly dignity and of filial tenderness towards an old father who has become as it were her child—when she meets her death before his eyes at the hands of assassins! What avails it that the guilty slaughter and poison, each other afterwards? None the less is this the titanic tragedy of human life; there rings forth from it a chorus of passionate, jeering, wildly yearning, and desperately wailing voices.
Sitting by his fire at night, Shakespeare heard them in the roar of the storm against the window-pane, in the howling of the wind in the chimneys—heard all these terrible voices contrapunctually inwoven one with another as in a fugue, and heard in them the torture-shriek of suffering humanity.
[XXVII]
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA—WHAT ATTRACTED SHAKESPEARE TO THE SUBJECT
If it is the last titanic tragedy of human life that has now been written, what is there more to add? There is nothing left to write. Shakespeare may lay down his pen.
So it would seem to us. But what is the actual course of events? what do we see? That for years to come, work follows work in uninterrupted succession. It is with Shakespeare as with all other great, prolific geniuses; time and again we think, "Now he has done his best, now he has reached his zenith, now he has touched the limit of his power, exhausted his treasury, made his crowning effort, his highest bid,"—when behold! he takes up a new work the day after he has let go the old; takes it up as if nothing had happened, unexhausted, unwearied by the tremendous task he has accomplished, fresh as if he had just arisen from repose, indefatigable as though he were only now setting forth with his name and fame yet to be won.
King Lear makes a sensation among Shakespeare's impressionable audience; crowds flock to the theatre to see it; the book is quickly sold out—two quarto editions in 1608; all minds are occupied with it; they have not nearly exhausted its treasures of profundity, of wit, of practical wisdom, of poetry—Shakespeare alone no longer gives a moment's thought to it; he has left it behind and is deep in his next work.
A world-catastrophe! He has no mind now to write of anything else. What is sounding in his ears, what is filling his thoughts, is the crash of a world falling to ruin.