But _King Lear_, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and
there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses,
and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the
best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely
to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its
dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the
peculiar effects to which I have referred,--a failure which is natural
because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a
rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason,
too, even the best attempts at exposition of _King Lear_ are
disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the
impalpable spirit of the _Tempest_.
I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the
dramatic defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its
extraordinary imaginative effect.
1
We may begin, however, by referring to two passages which have often
been criticised with injustice. The first is that where the blinded
Gloster, believing that he is going to leap down Dover cliff, does in
fact fall flat on the ground at his feet, and then is persuaded that he
_has_ leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved.
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