[In the following excerpt, Bayley compares pre-Shakespearean depictions of the youngest daughter in the Leir legend with Shakespeare's portrayal of Cordelia, finding that the latter "does not seem an original or unusual character to find in a play, but one who is not properly of it or in it. "]

We escape into the metaphysical in order to deal with King Lear, where the eighteenth century took a simpler, more robust, way out. The Romantics, Keats and Lamb for instance, have accustomed us to the idea of 'burning through' the play, and Hazlitt to the idea, which even Wilson Knight would be a little shy of countenancing too openly, that it is the play in which Shakespeare 'was most in earnest.' Lamb's query—'What gesture shall we appropriate to this?'—hits one nail on the head, but then opts for the meta-physical category of the sublime—the sublimest tragedy. Dr Johnson and his contemporaries took a different view. In spite of its formidable effectiveness as a tragic tale, the play had been made deliberately harrowing by Shakespeare: like Titus Andronicus only more so.

They were right. It is remarkable that though the play is without a spirit, without a style, it is none the less based on a version of the story which has clearly been used because it is the most painful conceivable. This might mean that the style itself becomes graphically agonising: Titus Andronicus is designed to enact stoicism and suffering as Hamlet is designed to enact a style and a despair in its own right. But in selecting the most painful way the story of King Lear could go, Shakespeare dispenses with any style that becomes the painfulness, and rises to it appropriately. Our general sense of this issue is in fact very much to the contrary of what the Gentleman says about Cordelia's grief for the sufferings of her father:

    In brief,
Sorrow would be a rarity most belov'd
If all could so become it.

The Gentleman adds his name to the many others in the play who try to respond appropriately to its pitiableness and outrage. This is his way of saying: 'This is the worst.' Cordelia, he thinks, is exactly right as the grieving daughter. But what is to come will deprive her of any such status, and what is to come is already implicit in the blur that surrounds her, the fact that no one looks the right way, if indeed there is a right way to look.

Tate solved the problem with a typical sort of eighteenth-century common sense. If the plot is to be changed, made both more melodramatic and happier, then she must be quite a different sort of person. The most important thing about his version is not so much the happy end as the thoroughgoing 'humanisation' of Cordelia. She is apparently the same girl, but it would be impossible to have hanged in the prison so engagingly commonplace a heroine as Tate provides—a Cordelia who has picked out Edgar to be her man, and behaves towards him with all the coquettish possessiveness that the new part demands. To kill such a girl in the way Shakespeare did would be worse than a crime, it would be a blunder. The ingenuity of the Tate version consists in making Shakespeare's look wrong. Shakespeare (they felt) made the error of creating a real and delightful and sympathetic girl, and then wantonly turning the screw of horror in order to create as succulently awful a finale as possible. And in a sense Tate and his contemporaries were quite right: Shakespeare does go too far in King Lear. But, having done so, he also produces no stylistic justification for doing so. That, to us, is the final effectiveness of his art here, but to the eighteenth century it must have seemed quite singularly uncalled for.

Even Dr Johnson thought so, and preferred Tate. But one wonders whether he was not accepting Tate's Cordelia as much the same sort of person as Shakespeare's. His praise of the play that 'hurries you irresistibly along', suggests that speed and excitement struck him as its leading characteristics, and these would be enhanced by the change and given the added justification of melodrama. Once Cordelia has become Edgar's sweetheart his cliffhanger rescue of her and her father is wholly proper to the form, as is Tate's Cordelia herself. Her chief preoccupation at the love-test ceremony, and it gives her just the kind of added personal motive such a heroine should have, is to avoid betrothal to her father's nominee, Burgundy.

One interest of Tate's Cordelia is that she is as 'right' in his version as all the pre-Shakespearean Cordelias were in theirs. Spenser's few stanzas in The Faerie Queene are concerned with a warlike and determined lady who gains a victory over her sisters and their husbands, restores her father, and is then deposed and imprisoned after his death by her nephews,—'Till wearie of that wretched life herself she hong.' Heroic suicide is just the thing for this Cordelia, who is also suited to its leisurely dynastic anecdotes and tales of things 'done long ago and ill-done'. Cordelia too, in the old Leir, is just right for the sentiment of that play, and in her romance relation with 'the Gallian king' seemed to Furness, the Variorum editor, 'more lovely and loveable' than the Cordelia of King Lear.

All these Cordelias are right for their situations: only Shakespeare's is not, in the sense that she is not the kind of character who can make plain that a situation is going on, and of what kind. On the part of critics and directors the sure way to a vulgarising of the play is to interpret her as fitting a situation, as her sisters do. This can be done in the most popular version of the play current today, in which the implications of the comic-grotesque are purposefully worked out. It makes a situation and a play intended to be, to quote Wilson Knight again, 'the most fearless artistic facing of the ultimate cruelty of things in our literature'. And this suggests a play as clear-cut in what it intends to be, and to do, as is the old sentimental Leir play, or Tate's melodrama. In every case the appropriate Cordelia is fitted to her situation, in the modern case in a play of grotesque incongruities, which require her death as a part of them. Every age gets its King Lear in the genre it requires.

And, more generally, its notions of the tragic. Every age has its own way of imposing a stereotype on a Cordelia fitted neither to its notions of tragedy, nor to its ideas—usually less variable—of how things should be done on the stage. Cordelia is the embodiment of that aspect of King Lear which tends to elude and disappear from itself, from its status and form as tragedy. Not only is she not made for tragedy: she does not seem to be made for art at all. Now this is obviously an inexact sort of thing to say, because anyone in a play has been designed for and put into it. Most modern drama in any case tries to give the impression that the characters have wandered in from outside, that they are not in any usual or conventional sense theatrical characters. But by not being so, they become, of course, theatrical in a novel and opposing sense. Cordelia is not like that; she does not seem an original or unusual character to find in a play, but one who is not properly of it or in it.

The way this impression is created—and as always with Shakespeare impression is everything—is initially quite simply done. Lear has cast himself—quite deliberately as it appears—for a role in a play, a play in which he as hero will be beloved father and wise ancient who renounces his powers to the young and strong. And of course this goes badly wrong, partly because Lear has cast himself for a role he does not really believe in—does an old man really grasp that he is old? Lear's big scene fails, and in failing produces the superbly effective drama of his range and his rejection of Cordelia. But in a less direct way the scene goes wrong not because Cordelia insists on playing the wrong part, but because she does not understand the business of playing a part at all. Lear, one could say, would be less exasperated by a defiant daughter, who opposed her own kind of part to his own, than by a daughter whose non-playing threatens his whole dramatic conception of himself.

Lear is much more evidently concerned with a part than are Shakespeare's other tragic heroes, and this itself serves to increase the sense of Cordelia's non-participation. Tate, one feels, was determined to bring her back into the play, and make her as exuberantly a part of it as the Cordelia of the old Leir.

Tate's Cordelia is as much concerned with the question of marriage as she is with gently opposing the part her father wants her to play, and substituting her own. To Shakespeare's Cordelia the question of marriage, as treated by her father and suitors, seems part of the whole unreality of the play situation. Lear himself draws attention to this: 'Sir, there she stands.' To stand there is indeed all that Cordelia can do. She does not even have to accept France formally, or to reply to his chivalrous speech. The 'hideous rashness' of her father reveals a theatre where the opposite number will not play at all. At this moment Lear is not just an old man. He has elected to overcome the disability by acting the part for all he is worth. As the play opens he chooses the play world, with all its passions and poses; the world in which Cordelia can only be uninvolved.

This brings up the question of what they have been doing until now, and how behaving? Here, as in so many other ways, the play is off-key, off-key to the usual Shakespearean harmony of character realisation. For, as Morgann observed, that realisation normally includes the previous, invisible, undisplayed experience of his characters, and makes it a part of themselves as we see them in the play. We have only to think of the unseen life of Gertrude and Claudius and Hamlet, or of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. That life is so imaginable precisely because it seems part of the total life of the play. In the case of King Lear it does not seem so. Another factor operates. Something in the tragedy depends on the presences of matters not of the tragic world, not of the play world at all; and this effect goes with the other we have noted: the tendency of the characters to protect themselves from their experiences with utterances and sentiments suited to a play.

A play like Hamlet or Macbeth would reveal with instant and invisible mastery what Cordelia was like. It would reveal her past, and its relations with her present. In their elementary way the Leir play and the Tate version both do this. Their Cordelia is like any other character in art. The old Leir play indeed rushes in with relish here, informing us that Gonorill and Ragan couldn't abide their sister, because she was 'so nice and so demure / So sober, courteous, modest and precise'; and moreover that she had the exasperating habit of looking much more attractive in any new fashion of clothing they took up than they did themselves. Imogen, Portia, Helena, Desdemona—any other heroine of Shakespeare would thrive on this kind of disclosed domesticity. And in the Tate version there is the love relation with Edgar, which supplies instant intrigue, story and background.

In King Lear no background exists. Instead it is as if life and choice had been forced to begin together from scratch by the great ceremony of the opening. Everything till now has been in abeyance, in eclipse. Now Lear has resolved to be himself and act his part and require others to endorse it, most especially his favourite daughter. Cordelia cannot enter into existence on these terms. Her existence itself is absolute, it has no 'story' to it; and this is conveyed by the blankness of her acceptance of marriage with France, as by the blankness of her rejection of her father's need that she should play a part with him.

In the other tragedies characters not only have a past but have a future as well. Although they die they might have lived. They themselves, or their friends, can imagine what might have been the case if they had. Hamlet 'was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov'd most royally.' Lady Macbeth 'should have died hereafter,' in the natural course of life's history: her story has a past and a possible future. Cordelia's life and death do not appear to come within the compass of this sort of fictional art, which Shakespeare is normally such an adept in supplying.

These aspects of Cordelia, suggested in the impression she makes in the great power of the piece, are none the less insubstantial enough—they do not have the air of an intention. The words she speaks are sufficiently like those of other people to excite no comment, as it were, in the context of a play in blank verse. And yet they are different, as everyone feels, and they produce subtle kinds of misunderstanding. Although Cordelia can heave her heart into her mouth perfectly well on occasion, as the overall convention of a play requires, she can also appear to discredit poetry, not intentionally, but by not embracing it, as the others do, as an extension of their wills and personalities. Lear, his other two daughters, Edmund and the rest, use poetry as they would use rhetoric. Shakespeare suggests—and it is an extraordinary feat of style to do so—that Cordelia cannot do this. She is as devoid of studied human eloquence as an angel might be. It is Romeo who says about Juliet

 O speak again bright angel, for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
                                  II. ii. 26-32

Poetry is being used, though for the most lyrical of reasons; the winged messenger himself would have no need to command such eloquence. The Gentleman speaks of Cordelia's tears in the same vein that Romeo does of Juliet.

      You have seen

Sunshine and rain at once? Her smiles and
  tears
Were like a better way. Those happy smilets
That played on her ripe lip seemed not to
  know
What guests were in her eyes, which parted
  thence
As pearls from diamonds dropped.
                               IV iii. 17-22

The fervour is undoubted, even though there is a comical incongruity between the Gentleman's eloquence and our sense of its object. (His phrase-finding has one point of real observation in it, none the less, and that is how an impression of Cordelia is at a loss for ordinary studied consistency: she baffles the summerup by her unselfconsciousness, even in the matter of her appearance in joy and grief.) But the use of poetic eloquence contrasts with the odd plain word that comes from Cordelia herself when she leaves with her new betrothed husband, the King of France, and, as she says, 'with washed eyes'. When Lear sees her again, on waking from distraction, her tears are the first thing he sees. 'Be your tears wet?' This, the most moving moment of the play, is so because it is the only time in it that the speech of father and daughter coincides. Neither is using words for effect or purpose, but like a kiss or touch. Lear has had no time to reassemble his sense of self and the language that goes with it.

LEAR. I feel this pin prick. Would I were
   assured
  Of my condition.

CORD.           O look upon me Sir
  And hold your hands in benediction o'er
   me.
  No Sir, you must not kneel.

LEAR. Pray do not mock me.
  I am a very foolish fond old man,
  Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or
    less,
  And to deal plainly
  I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
  Methinks I should know you and know this
    man.
  Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant
  What place this is, and all the skill I have
  Remembers not these garments; nor I know
    not
  Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh
  at me.
  For, as I am a man, I think this lady
  To be my child Cordelia.

CORD.            And so I am, I am.

LEAR.            Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray,
    weep not.
  If you have poison for me I will drink it.
  I know you do not love me, for your sisters
  Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
  You have some cause, they have not.

CORD.             NO cause, no cause …

LEAR.             You must bear with me.
  Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old
    and foolish.
                           IV. vi. 56-75, 84-5

His words—'mainly', 'plainly', 'not an hour more or less'—have the same ring as hers, and the most moving thing is not their 'togetherness'—so consciously emphasised in the old Leir play, but the seeming incompatibility of both estrangement and taking each other thankfully for granted. Since her sisters have done him wrong she can't love him either; but he knows she does, and takes it now for granted as much as he had once insisted on its expression.

Perhaps the most moving thing is the sense that, whatever happens, it cannot last. Lear is not that kind of man, and taking things for granted is not in his nature. There could be no greater contrast than between this scene and the one after the battle, when Lear in the full exaltation of assertive consciousness sees himself and Cordelia united forever at last.

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. Have I
  caught thee?

Tragedy for Lear is as much what would have happened as what actually does. In his relation with Cordelia, Lear enjoys at the close of his fortunes a transcendent and visionary moment of life. That the vision is impossible does not alter the truth and happiness of it in Lear's eyes:

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel
 down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them
 too,
Who loses and who wins: who's in, who's
 out,
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies.
                                          V. iii. 9-17

Mystery means mastery, in the sense that a craft or profession is mastered. Lear's vision is again one of power, of his kingship by other means, but that is not the most of it. Cordelia will now be entirely his, completing the fantasy of life that sprang into existence at the beginning of the play. And, in the face of this, Cordelia, like reality itself, again has nothing to say. Her last line has already been spoken, and in its into-nation is one of her simplest and most characteristic and yet strangest in the play: 'Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?' For her it is the matter in hand that counts and the relational aspect of her normal duty. Lear in any case has forgotten that she is a married woman, and that her husband the King of France has responded to her appeal to restore Lear to his kingdom.

Not surprisingly, for France is as shadowy a figure as the battle from which he is absent—rather necessarily absent—is perfunctory. But it is important that he exists, for he is part of the simple reality in which Cordelia lives. There are moments in the play, and this is one of them, when the impression with which it opens, of existence and choice beginning for two people, makes all the 'stories' in it seem not worth bothering about. In fact they are, as we shall see, and in a manner unique to this play; but the unstoried relation of Lear and Cordelia is none the less apart from them. The tragedy of the relation is that it cannot exist as Lear wishes it to, and she can do nothing to help the matter.

The play begins with a declaration of love. This means that, whatever the story tells us, nothing would satisfy Lear. He wants the impossible. Cordelia knows this and accepts it. It does not change her duty or her love, but the real significance of her reply is that she knows that what Lear wants is not hers to give. The mystery that surrounds her ordinariness is that of a plain and unacceptable truth. Goethe said that every old man is a king Lear, but it is also true that every man, old or not, tends to be one.

The play's universality is concerned with this. Browning must have intuited it when he took the line 'Child Roland to the Dark Tower came', and made it into a poem. Much has been written about the meaning of that poem, and its deliberate mysteriousness, but its allegory is clear enough. The Dark Tower is the end of strenuous illusion; it is the mere thing in itself. Browning wrote the poem in Paris, after the difficulties of his marriage had begun to reveal themselves. Now the reality had begun: the thing itself was there. At the beginning, Lear addresses himself to the achievement of his ideal, and to the part he will play to get it. The reality of Cordelia is itself the Dark Tower. But he neither knows it for what it is nor is he capable of accepting it.

A PLAY IN EARNEST

No wonder that Hazlitt said that this was the play in which Shakespeare was most in earnest. Everyone feels that, and the fact that he was not in earnest in the normal sense—the sense in which Dante and Milton were—does not alter the matter. The story let his genius work in the deepest understanding of things, and give the completest form and pressure to his sense of tragedy. It is concerned with discrepancy: the absolute difference between Lear and Cordelia, the absolute difference between life as a play to be arranged, and as the space between our coming hither and going hence. But out of this simplicity comes a very great deal of complication, complication that works on different levels and through different modes of discourse. In none of the plays are these more oddly related to one another, or more productive of further rewards and fascinations. In none does earnestness itself seem to become more earnest, however subtle and peculiar its relation is to what is off-key. In none do virtue and simplicity appear more evidently. In none does deliberation amount to so little.

'Oh the difference between man and man,' says Goneril. Such differences are especially marked not only between the persons in it, but between different aspects of the play. In Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love H. A. Mason took the bull by the horns when he called it not only the most irritating but even the most disappointing of Shakespeare's tragedies, because it is so good in some places and so extremely bad in others. Middleton Murry and critics before him made the same kind of point. That Shakespeare is sometimes 'bad'—mechanical or perfunctory or stereo-typed—is of course a commonplace, but the objection here is that these things not only get in the way of the play's greatness but give it a quality of uncertainty, of the accidental.

Mason takes particular objection to Edgar's killing of Oswald, whom he thinks should merely have been frightened, and to the odious way in which he describes his disposal of the body ('Here in the sands / Thee I'll rake up, the post unsanctified / Of murderous lechers'). He cannot abide the contrivance by which Edgar and Edmund come to their armed confrontation, and particularly dislikes the complacency of the victorious Edgar's summing-up of the situation ('That dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes').

Such criticisms, exhibiting the pedantic or priggish views of a given age and society, have always been voiced. But their importance in relation to the world of Lear, and the particular vehemence with which Mason in particular has made them, do show something of importance. In fact such things are as essential to the world of Lear as anything else, for they help dispose of any conscious aura of its earnestness and sublimity. The story is part of the bewilderment of living and its minor incomprehensibilities. Meeting and divergence—as Lear's with Cordelia—go together with its humble necessities. In Hamlet plot contrivance is closely integrated with the intellectual atmosphere: the two are part of the same art. But in King Lear they are very different parts.

Lear and his daughter, like Gloucester and Edgar, are in one sense deeply attached, in another utterly apart and separated. That is in any case a normal family thing. But the unwinding of the plot emphasises it. The encounters of Edgar and Oswald, of Edmund and Edgar, are as hasty and provisional as the last we see of Lear and Cordelia in life together. In the context of action truth to life is a momentary truth, as we are hurried irresistibly along, and this is the most strangely and richly momentary of plays. There is no liaison between soliloquy and plot, as in Hamlet or Macbeth. Nothing profound, to be questioned or thought on or decided, interrupts the immediacy of experience. And yet of course the inquirer knows that in the midst of this medley is the most earnest, touching and profound of Shakespearean imaginations. No wonder he wants to separate one thing from another, the chaff from the wheat.

But it cannot and should not be done. Triviality will have its say: again, not in the sense that Hamlet has the Osric scene, and the Polonius and Reynaldo scene, to remind us of other aspects of life. All aspects cohere here, and in cohering reveal the sort of sensationalism on which living is based. The most startling example, which a modern audience cannot respond to as the old one would have, but which is none the less of great significance, is the loss of the battle by Lear's party. This is signalised by Edgar rushing in to carry off his old father from a spot now grown mortally dangerous.

EDG. Away old man! Give me thy hand.
  Away! …

GLOU. No further sir—a man may rot even
  here.

EDG. What, in ill thoughts again? Men must
   endure
  Their going hence even as their coming
   hither.
  Ripeness is all. Come on.
                                  V. ii. 5, 8-11

Lear's eloquence in the next scene, his vision of a motionless Elysium of loving and detached repose in the prison with Cordelia, is swept out of the way by the next bit of action. The better informed among the old audiences must here have been in a state of high curiosity and expectation. In the old play, and in all versions they might have heard, Cordelia and her father win the battle, though in a ballad (afterwards collected by Percy) the victorious girl herself dies in action. What an audience would not have expected to see is the triumph at this point of the play of the forces of evil, even if they were British. Again, all is uncertainty, and immediately the pair are led away something sinister—but what?—passes between Edmund and one of his captains. From this, and from Edmund's soliloquy before the battle, it is clear that he intends to make away with the pair if he can—but will he succeed?

This suspense overlays the ensuing action and separates itself from it. In the same way action both over-rides the family theme and is irrelevant to it. The chivalry of the encounter between Edgar and Edmund, and their 'exchange of charity' after it, is not eclipsed by what may be going forward in the unseen prison, as a result of that secret instruction. All aspects of the play are now proceeding independently, each insuring that no general tone or atmosphere will dominate it. These separate actions are each as valid in their way as the sentiments uttered as a result of them: sentiments like Edgar's about the 'dark and vicious place', like Albany's about the 'Justicers' above, and the heavens sending down to 'tame these vilde offences'. Only someone determined to make sense of the play, according to a preconception, or desire to sort out the good and bad in it, is exasperated by the way in which such action and sentiment moves separately, and regards it as evidence of confusion or weakness.

All are in a way echoes of the fact that the gap, the distance between Lear and Cordelia, remains as constant as the love. One thing so unexpected and effective in their scene together after capture is how they have changed places, though the same gap remains. She is stoical, but her passionate desire is to confront 'these daughters and these sisters' and passionately to express her indignation and abhorrence, if it is the last thing she does. There is nothing in her 'personality' to explain this, but it is her simple desire to do it, as were her previous needs to speak the truth to her father, then to rescue and shelter him. By contrast there is a great deal in Lear's personality to explain his exaltation. He no longer has the slightest interest in catching and killing his daughters and sons-in-law, for he has 'caught' Cordelia herself.

        Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from
 heaven
And fire us hence like foxes.

Have / caught thee? should be the intonation. Their capture has given him his chance to be her captor, a state of affairs still more satisfactory to his imagination than to be the tyrant of her 'most kind nursery'. And indeed no one can part them, for they have never been joined.

She is as distant from him as is Edmund from the two sisters to whom he makes love. The 'difference between man and man' is again well exemplified. Compared to Macbeth's actions, or those of Claudius or Richard III or Iago, Edmund's activities display only the contented self-absorption of most human business. His orders for the prisoners' death, like his plot against his father, and his sudden reversal of fortune, seem like an interlude in the foreground of the suffering and bereavement which they cause, but with which they do not appear connected. As so often in King Lear one is reminded of the technique of great narrative painting, with its apparently uncoordinated detail of separate event.

Edmund's 'repentance' has the same lack of co-ordination here as Cordelia's obstinate wish in defeat to confront her sisters. It used to be a critical question whether his repentance were genuine or not, one body of opinion inclining to the ingenious idea that he deliberately postponed repentance and reversal of orders until he knew it could do no good, thus achieving the maximum 'Oh if only we'd remembered a bit earlier' effect. But this sort of criticism is like Mason's and Middleton Murry's, seeking to excuse where they wanted to censure, but both trying to tidy things up and put them in order. Edmund is a wholly spontaneous figure, his part lying on that side of the canvas where impulse naturally joins hands with the hurry of action. The audience see the arrangement that leads them to look into every scene in it, however disjunct, as parts of a spacious whole. Having lost, why should Edmund not have the impulse to undo mischief, just as he did it? The appalling damage he does is not what he deliberately wants, but the result of his will to action, as if he had accidentally killed several people when deciding to drive very fast from A to B. This now is a last flourish of his will, for which he finds an appropriate formula: 'Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature.' In the same spirit he says of Goneril and Regan: 'I was contracted to them both: all three / Now marry in an instant.' It gives him joy that they loved him, and even that 'The wheel is come full circle: I am here.'

Edmund's last scene and lost death is typical of the ease of King Lear, the way in which corny historical-type drama becomes a part of it. Edmund is so well fitted for this part that the casualness with which he ruins those against whom he has no hate helps to spread the load of the play still wider, to reduce even more the sense in which it demonstrates itself as an earnest play on a sublime theme. The effectiveness of Edmund, in terms of his own self and of a simplistic convention, is the way in which he helps to show how little intensification the play needs, how much more moving it is without invoking it. His death 'is but a trifle here', as Albany says, but because it is a death of melodrama, or of tragedy, it shows the nature of such a death in contrast with death of another kind. The difference between one and another is no less, in this context, than that between man and man.

The natures of Cornwall, of Goneril and Regan, are as different from his as both are from those of Kent or Cordelia. They are bad and dreadful in the family sense, like the kind of children who torment animals and pull the wings off flies. They are dreadful but also sluggish, without the gaiety and will to achievement that is in Edmund, and to which they respond, the women idolatrously. Edmund, who does the most harm, is none the less outside that family area in which both the real harm and the real good are done. Gloucester's blinding, from which Edmund is excluded, is a family scene, its Cordelia being the servant who served Cornwall since he was a child and now bids him 'hold his hand' and refrain from the wanton wickedness of the action.