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graves,' there is a reference to the Gunpowder Plot of Nov. 5, 1605, we have another approximation to the date. But without insisting too much upon this, it is, I think, highly probable that Shakespeare did not begin to write King Lear till towards the end of the year 1605, and that his attention may have been directed to the story as a subject for tragedy by the revival of the older play above mentioned, which was published in the same year.

Having now reduced the period of composition to the narrow limits between the end of 1605 and Christmas, 1606, any attempt to assign the date more exactly must be purely conjectural and derived from internal evidence. It would be difficult to fix the precise season to which the storm in the third act is appropriate. Various indications in the previous act seem to point to the winter; such as the Fool's speech (ii. 4. 45), ' Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way,' though of course this had also another meaning. Again, the signs of the gathering storm are wintry, 'the bleak winds do sorely ruffle,' ''tis a wild night'; but Lear's apostrophe is addressed to a violent summer tempest, and so Kent describes it. And in accordance with this all the colouring of the fourth act is of the summer. Lear is seen

'Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,

With hor-docks, hemlocks, nettles, cuckow-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.'

'Search every acre in the high-grown field', points to July, and we must not insist too much upon strict botanical accuracy, for this would be late for cuckoo-flowers, as well as for the samphire-gathering in a subsequent scene, which generally takes place in May. Perhaps Shakespeare began the play in the winter of 1605 and finished it in the summer of 1606, while the fields were still covered with the unharvested corn, and the great storm of March was still fresh in his recollection.

In the low estate of English literature which followed the Restoration of the Stuarts, King Lear suffered the humiliation

of being adapted for the stage by Nahum Tate, who shares with Nicholas Brady the honour which belongs to the metrical version of the Psalms. That Tate should have done this is not surprising, for he was poet laureat and a worthy successor to Shadwell; but that for a hundred years the English playgoing public should have known Shakespeare's Lear only through the travesty of Tate, which Garrick acted and of which Johnson approved, is a significant fact, as showing the degradation of taste and the absolute dominion of mediocrity in literature.

It has been objected to the editions of Shakespeare's plays in the Clarendon Press Series that the Notes are too exclusively of a verbal character, and that they do not deal with æsthetic or, as it is called, the higher criticism. So far as I have had to do with them, I frankly confess that æsthetic notes have been deliberately and intentionally omitted, because one main object of these editions is to induce those for whose use they are expressly designed to read and study Shakespeare himself, and not to become familiar with opinions about him. Perhaps too it is because I cannot help experiencing a certain feeling of resentment when I read such notes that I am unwilling to intrude upon others what I should myself regard as impertinent. They are in reality too personal and subjective, and turn the commentator into a showman. With such sign-post criticisms I have no sympathy. Nor do I wish to add to the awful amazement which must possess the soul of Shakespeare when he knows of the manner in which his works have been tabulated and classified and labelled with a purpose after the most approved method like modern tendenzschriften. Such criticism applied to Shakespeare is nothing less than a gross anachronism. But the main objection I feel to æsthetic notes is that they are beside the scope and purpose of these books as vehicles of instruction and education. They would interfere with the independent effort of the reader to understand the author, and would substitute for that effort a second-hand opinion acquired from another which, both as regards method and result, is vastly inferior in educational value.

With regard to Lear itself, nothing more true has been ever said than was said long since by Hazlitt in his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays: To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence.' And with this may be coupled the deliberate judgement of that fine critic and devout worshipper of Shakespeare, Charles Lamb: Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.' His Essay on the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation, is of the greatest value and should be read as a whole as an example of the subtlest and profoundest criticism. I quote only what he says of our play: 'So to see Lear acted,—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,-we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon

the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when, in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old"? What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show it is too hard and stony; it must have lovescenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!— as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,—the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,-why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,—as if at his years, and with his experience, anything was left but to die.'

For an analysis of the characters of the various personages I know nothing better than what is contained in the Introduction to the play in the edition of Shakespeare by the Rev. H. N. Hudson (Boston, 1863), and in Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics of Women.

The present text has been taken from the Globe and Cambridge editions, with such slight omissions as were rendered necessary to adapt it for use in schools.

WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT.

TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,

August, 1875.

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Kent. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

Glou. It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most; for equalities are so weighed, that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

Kent. Is not this your son, my lord?

Glou. His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge: I have so often blushed to acknowledge him, that now I am brazed to it. But I have, sir, a son by order of law, some year

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