What is said of the King, suggests not merely a lack of capacity in the ordering of things, but a malevolent purpose, as if the gods had marked us down for their sport. On this reading, Lear’s reference to himself and Cordelia as “God’s spies” will mean, as an early commentator suggested, “spies placed over God Almighty, to watch his motions.” Maybe there is need of surveillance, if the human sacrifices on which the gods themselves throw incense are offered up for their pleasure; if the brand of fire that parts the predestined victims is handed down, and with an antique malice, from Heaven. “Can so much wrath dwell in heavenly spirits!” The Roman poet Virgil raised the question first, and it is still a problem for Shakespeare. The chill that invades us as, huddled with the others against the roaring wind and rain, we await the advent of unaccommodated man: “What art thou that dost grumble there i’ th’ straw?” is occasioned by the wild surmise, so much more fearful because it is involuntary, that the fiend is really walking up and down in the earth, and with the sufferance and even the connivance of Heaven. In the pitiless conclusion of King Lear, the dominion of the Prince of Darkness seems confirmed, and his presence a substantial presence as, with his terrible vans, he enshadows and overwhelms the just and the unjust alike.

If Fortune brag of two she loved and hated,
One of them we behold, (282-83)

Thou‘lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never, (309-,10)

That is, I daresay, only an apparition, the disnatured child of night thoughts, and as such may be dispelled. But it needs more than to rub one’s eyes, or to mutter a pious ejaculation. To such a degree is this true that even critics so tough-minded as Dr. Johnson have averted their eyes rather than acquiesce in the final horror with which the dramatist confronts them. It is too literal, too realistic for “dramatick exhibition.” And yet it is remarkable that this play, in which Shakespeare’s unremitting fidelity to fact is almost an occasion for scandal, manifests in its beginning a studied and a deliberate indifference to fact. If subsequent scenes are so realistic as hardly to be endured, the opening scenes have not to do with realism but with ritual and romance. Their abiding characteristic is a niggling formality. They do not wear the aspect of life so much as the aspect of art. Kent, lapsing into rude rhyme as he takes his departure, catches and communicates that aspect. His language is gnomic, admonitory, and simple—not naïvely but consciously simple: “artificial.” He is not, for the moment, a real (an eccentric) man who displaces air like Hamlet or Parolles. He is, and by design, a flat character, highly conventionalized, who figures in an old-fashioned morality play. He would speak a prophecy before he goes.

The language of the other protagonists is of a piece with his. It does not evoke—not yet—the savage business of dragons of the prime (for all that the dragon is portentous in the threatening speeches of the King), so much as the ceremonious (the otherworldly !) business of proceedings at law and finance. Legal and fiscal metaphors reverberate. Gloucester, treating of his sons, asserts that the elder is no more dear than the younger, in his account. Lear, enacting his intention to abdicate the throne, renounces interest of territory, or possession. In lieu of Kent’s insistence that he reserve his state, he stipulates his troop of knights as reservation, explicitly a legalism, in which the action of retaining a privilege is denoted. He would extend his largest bounty where nature challenges merit, or makes title to it. Regan, whose tenders of affection aim at that title, finds that Goneril has anticipated her very deed of love. The King, in whose simple-minded understanding love is a commodity, urges his youngest daughter to discover what portion her protestations can draw. But Cordelia loves only according to her bond. Failing to please, her price is fallen. Goneril pleases, in that she is taken as permitting to her father twice the retinue permitted by Regan. Her devotion may therefore be measured. She is precisely twice her sister’s love.

Lear is not easily persuaded of his error, that devotion—in his psychology, a ponderable thing—is to be assessed and ought to be requited in ponderable ways. The inadmissible equation is there still, in the crass appeal to Regan when his agony is upon him:

Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot,
Wherein I thee endowed.