Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us,
and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from _King Lear_
an impression which is at least as near of kin to the _Divine Comedy_ as
to _Othello_.
3
For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice
and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something,
it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are
the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme
in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with
much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their
worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
ultimate power and those appeals for retribution.
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