His flawed heart, on the evidence of the play, is too weak to support it. His nature cannot carry the affliction or the fear.

What ribs of oak, when mountains melt on them,
Can hold the mortise? (Othello, 2.1)

Human beings endure until they expire, dying the pain of death every hour, in a night that pities neither wise man nor fool. What is more unsettling, to be wise is not to be provident. “Man may his fate foresee, but not prevent.” And thus Webster’s conclusion, in The White Devil: “ ‘Tis better to be fortunate than wise.” Man is the natural fool of fortune. That is the title he is born with. It is the stars, and not our own endeavors, that govern. After all we are their tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them. We do not get our deserts. The optimism is foolishness, to which we are prone.

I would not take this from report. It is,
And my heart breaks at it. (4.6.143-44)

The wry conjunctions contrived by the playwright-who knows out of what bitterness or whimsy—attest to its folly. Edgar, in a sanguine mood, is sure that the worst returns to laughter. He is confronted at once with the bleeding visage of his father.

The worst is not
So long as we can say “This is the worst.” (4.1.26-27)

But Shakespeare is not done with him yet. “If ever I return to you again, I’ll bring you comfort” (5.2.3-4). That is Edgar’s promise to Gloucester before the battle. It is a rash promise, and poor comfort attends on it. A hiatus ensues, filled up with alarums and excursions. Then Edgar reenters and speaks again: “Away, old man.... King Lear hath lost” (5-6).

The optimism of Albany, as it is even more extravagant, is more sternly reproved.

All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings. (5.3.305-06)

In that cheerful saying his philosophy is embodied. But the pentameter line, only three feet long, lacks its conclusion. Albany, rather cruelly, is made to supply the missing feet: “O, see, see!” It is the last agony of Lear to which his attention is directed.

Albany, as he presents the hopeful man who insists, a little too suavely, that God’s in His Heaven, is Shakespeare’s particular butt. It is he who cries, of Cordelia: “The gods defend her!” (258) The stage direction follows, enforcing the most monstrous conjunction in the play: “Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms.” The gods do not defend us. Perhaps they are unable to. “The gods reward your kindness,” says Kent to Gloucester. That is the reading of the Folio, and surely it is the right reading. But the reading of the Quarto provokes speculation: “The gods deserve your kindness.” It is as if the gods are weak, and require that humans collaborate with them in wielding the world. Lear, as his ar dor for the right grows upon him, shakes the superflux to the wretched. His intent is, as he says, to show the heavens more just. It is at least tenable to interpret: his intent is to justify their feckless ways as he can.

Maybe the heavens are worse than insufficient.