(2.4.178-79)

He is appropriately answered, since that respects of fortune are his love:

Good sir, to the purpose. (180)

This veneer of the unreal and the ritualistic, overlaying the initial action of the play, is not peculiar to the love test. The characters themselves move in an air of unreality. There is about them a felt sense of contradiction, as between what they are and what they seem to be. Lear is not a king but the show of a king. It is an insubstantial pageant over which he presides, recalling, in its unreality, the specious parade with which an earlier tragedy of Shakespeare’s commences, that of Richard II, the mockery king of snows. Kent’s acumen is verified when, with a lack of respect that is intended to shock and thereby to quicken perception, he sees and salutes his master, not as a monarch but as an old man.

But if Lear is an unreal image, so are the wicked daughters. Their essential vacuity, echoing to the touch, announces itself as it issues in their exaggerated protestings of love. Kent points to it obliquely in his praise of Cordelia:

Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds
Reverb no hollowness. (1.1.155-56)

Gloucester discerns it, magnified to cosmic proportions, in the disordered state of the macrocosm, riven by machinations, by the hollowness that is hypocrisy. All that glisters is taken for gold. The pretension of the hypocrite, who professes herself weighs more than the practice of the candid and guileless retainer, who professes himself to be no less than he seems. The mere appearance is everything, and hence what is lifelike and vital is eclipsed. The characters are cut in alabaster, like monumental statues. The same metaphor describes the fool and the knave and the paragon of virtue, divesting each of human personality. Gloucester, who seems a good old man, is brazed by self-indulgence, become like hard metal. Regan, in whom nature appears tender-hefted, is hardened to insensibility, made of that self metal as her sister. Cordelia is, conversely, a little-seeming substance. But Cordelia is rendered also in nonhuman terms: her love, a precious metal, is more ponderous than her tongue.

an enemy to all other joys
Which the most precious square of sense professes, (73-74)

Stylization of language and gesture is notable in such a play as The Tempest, and for excellent and obvious reasons. Shakespeare’s resort to it in King Lear seems, however, gratuitous, and even antipathetic to the spirit of the play. Lear is not masquelike nor, certainly, romantic, in the harrowing story it tells. But observe that The Tempest begins, not formally, but realistically, with the faithful depicting of a ship driving on the rocks, a wild and literal scene in which the blasphemy and execration of real and affrighted persons bass the throbbing of the storm. And then the scene shifts abruptly. The auditor or reader, whose belief is purchased at the outset by a terrific glimpse of the real world, is brought safe to shore: is induced to enter, and willingly, the world of enchantment and romance. The fact of the transition, and the implausibility attendant on it, elude him. The tempest is still dinning in his ears.

In King Lear the dramatic problem is exactly reversed. It is to ensure that those whose disenchantment the playwright is already preparing, who are to be compelled to look on the Gorgon-features, will not evince incredulity or petrifaction. The problem is resolved by emphasizing at the outset the elements of unreality and romance. The impelling action of Lear is made to resemble a fairy tale, which is, I suppose, its ultimate source. The auditor or reader is fooled.