—Beloved Regan,
Thy sister's naught;—O Regan, she hath tied
Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture, here.
I can scarce speak to thee;—thou'lt not believe
Of how deprav'd a quality—O Regan!
'Reg'. I pray you, Sir, take patience; I have hope,
You less know how to value her desert,
Than she to scant her duty.
'Lear' Say, how is that?
Nothing is so heart-cutting as a cold unexpected defence or palliation of a cruelty passionately complained of, or so expressive of thorough hard-heartedness. And feel the excessive horror of Regan's 'O, Sir, you are old!'—and then her drawing from that universal object of reverence and indulgence the very reason for her frightful conclusion—
Say, you have wrong'd her!
All Lear's faults increase our pity for him. We refuse to know them otherwise than as means of his sufferings, and aggravations of his daughters' ingratitude.
'Ib.' Lear's speech:—
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous, &c.
Observe that the tranquillity which follows the first stunning of the blow permits Lear to reason.
Act iii. sc. 4. O, what a world's convention of agonies is here! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed,—the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent—surely such a scene was never conceived before or since! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michel Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement; and the intervention of the fifth scene is particularly judicious,—the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full madness in the sixth scene.
'Ib.' sc. 7. Gloster's blinding:—
What can I say of this scene?—There is my reluctance to think Shakspeare wrong, and yet—