Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.
[X.]
How Climax meets Climax in the centre of Lear.
A Study in more complex Passion and Movement.
The plot of Lear highly complex.
IN Julius Cæsar we have seen how, in the case of a very simple play, a few simple devices are sufficient to produce a regular rise and fall in the passion. We now turn to a highly elaborate plot and trace how, notwithstanding the elaborateness, a similar concentration of the passion in the centre of the play can be secured. King Lear is one of the most complex of Shakespeare's tragedies; its plot is made up of a number of separate actions, with their combinations accurately carried out, the whole impressing us with a sense of artistic involution similar to that of an elaborate musical fugue. Here, however, we are concerned only indirectly with the plot of the play: we need review it no further than may suffice to show what distinct interests enter into it, and enable us to observe how the separate trains of passion work toward a common climax at the centre.
Starting from the notion of pattern as a fundamental idea we have seen how Plot presents trains of events in human life taking form and shape as a crime and its nemesis, an oracle and its fulfilment, the rise and fall of an individual, or even as simply a story. The main plot exhibits the Problem form of dramatic action.The particular form of action underlying the main plot of King Lear is different from any we have yet noticed. It may be described as a Problem Action. A mathematician in his problem assumes some unusual combination of forces to have come about, and then proceeds to trace its consequences: so the Drama often deals with problems in history and life, setting up, before the commencement of the play or early in the action, some peculiar arrangement of moral relations, and then throughout the rest of the action developing the consequences of these to the personages involved. Thus the opening scene of King Lear is occupied in bringing before us a pregnant and suggestive state of affairs: imperiousness is represented as overthrowing conscience and setting up an unnatural distribution of power. The problem stated.A human problem has thus been enunciated which the remainder of the play has to work out to its natural solution.
Imperiousness seems to be the term appropriate to Lear's conduct in the first scene. This is no case of dotage dividing an inheritance according to public declarations of affection. The division had already been made according to the best advice: i. i. 3, &c.in the case of two of the daughters 'equalities had been so weighed that curiosity in neither could make choice of either's moiety'; and if the portion of the youngest and best loved of the three was the richest, this is a partiality natural enough to absolute power. The opening scene of the play is simply the court ceremony in which the formal transfer is to be made. 38.Lear is already handing to his daughters the carefully drawn maps which mark the boundaries of the provinces, 49.when he suddenly pauses, and, with the yearning of age and authority for testimonies of devotion, calls upon his daughters for declarations of affection, the easiest of returns for the substantial gifts he is giving them, and which Goneril and Regan pour forth with glib eloquence. 84.Then Lear turns to Cordelia, and, thinking delightedly of the special prize he has marked out for the pet of his old age, asks her: