The suspense the play develops is a function of the ascending action, which is not material but spiritual. Battles and thrones count for little. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?

The rising and falling curves, the hero tasting his folly, the hero triumphing over it, intersect in the center of the play, in the fourth scene of Act 3. It is on the heath that Lear reaches his nadir. His characteristic utterance is the command: the wonted reversal follows: he is made less than the slave of a detested groom. These are the injuries that he himself has procured. So far the parallel is precise to the action of the other tragedies.

But now the crucial difference. It is also on the heath that Lear is made pregnant to pity. That is another and an unexpected kind of reversal. “In boy, go first.” These words, addressed to the Fool, who stands shivering in the rain before a hovel that is the refuge of a madman, constitute the real, as opposed to the apparent, hinge of the play. They do not signal the decay but the metamorphosis of the King, Lear the Socialist, got up in a red shirt. The great apostrophe to the poor follows at once:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe‘er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? 0, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! (28-33)

From this point, the action turns upward.

The structure of the subplot duplicates and so of course clarifies and confirms that of the central story. As the King is limed, and by his own folly, so are Gloucester and Edgar. “A credulous father, and a brother noble” (1.2.192). The one is, initially, an unthinking sensualist. The other, the younger, is initially a kind of clown: “and pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy” (145-46). But the degradation of Gloucester is not ratified. He also undergoes a miraculous transformation. The critical point or pivot at which this transformation is announced is located, like Lear‘s, in the mathematical center of the play (3.3), which is also, with a fit symmetry, the symbolic center where meanings are clarified. The man who wants to please everyone and would have all well between the contending parties, is emboldened suddenly to choose. “If I die for it, as no less is threatened me, the King my old master must be relieved” (18-19). In that decision is his death, but also his salvation.

The retrieving of Edgar is more spectacular, if not so abruptly achieved. Edgar is conceded the chance to grow and prosper. He seizes his chance; he makes himself over. “Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.6.80). The dupe of the opening scenes is the philosopher who dominates in the close of the play.

This is not to pretend that the close is thereby made happy. “All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly” (5.3.292). Kent’s somber valediction is approved. If the kindness of the one daughter hints at the redemption of Nature, it does not take off entirely the general curse which twain have brought her to. The implication is uneasy in Edgar’s assertion (as of one who is saying “what we ought to say”) that man must obey the weight of the time.