“O Heavens!
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause: send down, and take my part!”
As Regan and Goneril chaffered and haggled to reduce the cost of his entertainment, he revealed in his face and by-play the effect their conduct had on him. The rising thoughts and emotions suffused his features in advance of their expression. He stood before the audience like a stained window that burns with the light of the landscape it hides. He then began in a low tone of supplicating feebleness and gradually mounted to a climax of frenzy, where the voice, raised to screaming shrillness, broke in helplessness, exemplifying that degree of passion which is impotent from its very intensity. Those critics who blamed him for this excess as a fault were wrong, not he; for it belongs to a rage which unseats the reason to have no power of repression, and so to recoil on itself in exhaustion:
“You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both.
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely: touch me with noble anger.