By the side
of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who are the principal
figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the chief
persons of the secondary plot. Now by means of this double action
Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the
strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the
disadvantages were dramatically greater. The number of essential
characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated,
and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the
reader's attention,[132] rapidly transferred from one centre of interest
to another, is overstrained. He becomes, if not intellectually confused,
at least emotionally fatigued. The battle, on which everything turns,
scarcely affects him. The deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster
seem 'but trifles here'; and anything short of the incomparable pathos
of the close would leave him cold. There is something almost ludicrous
in the insignificance of this battle, when it is compared with the
corresponding battles in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_; and though there
may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main one is
simply that there was no room to give it its due effect among such a
host of competing interests.
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