Before he is aware, he has become a participant in the fierce and excessively painful dispute between damnation and impassioned clay.

But there is more than craft to Shakespeare’s design in thus introducing his drama. He makes his characters unreal initially because he means them, at least in part, to be symbolic. The stylized quality of the beginning, as of a charade, its legalistic and ceremonious nature, the exalting in it of appearance as against reality, all work to the fulfilling of that primary intention. And though Lear is essentially representational drama, though realism very quickly takes precedence over ritual, the element of the symbolic is never dissipated altogether but figures in important ways until the end. Just as in Twelfth Night, whose burden is mistaken identity and the ho cus-pocus of identical twins, realism intrudes persistently to temper and give substance to romance—

In nature there’s no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deformed but the unkind.
Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks, o‘erflourished by the devil.

(Twelfth Night, 3.4.379-82)

—so in King Lear, an anti-romantic play in that its burden is a relentless anatomizing of evil, the symbolic declines to yield entirely to the representational. It persists, not to give substance to the teal, which is substantial enough—

Out, vile jelly!
Where is thy luster now? (3.7.84-85)

—but to order the real and make it meaningful, to avoid a confounding of it with the merely sensational. Not to grasp this ordering function is, necessarily, to run counter, to smell a fault where no fault is. Thus the embarrassment of critics so estimable as Goethe (for whom the action of the play was a tissue of the improbable and absurd), and Colendge (who saw the first scene as dispensable), and A. C. Bradley (who detected and enumerated in the whole, more and grosser inconsistencies than in any other of the great tragedies).

Misconstruction of the role and character of Cordelia typifies this failure to come to terms with the symbolic. Cordelia is, of old, a deeply disquieting figure. Why does she love, and yet remain silent? The question has engendered a little galaxy of answers. It is a question not to be asked. The first principle of good dramatic manners is to concede to the dramatist his given, so long as he is able to exploit it. Here, the given is the heroine’s fatal reserve. It is the lever that starts the play on its progress. As such, it may not be queried, any more than the procedure that governs in chess or in the writing of an Italian sonnet.

But “reserve” is after all the wrong word. It suggests the wrong frame of reference. It leads to the rationalization of conduct on realistic grounds. To make the horrid point, this judgment of a contemporary critic may be cited, that Cordelia loved her father “less than she loved her own way and hated her sisters.” That is a fair sample of the appeal to realism. It is at all costs to be avoided. Cordelia does not betray, what Coleridge thought to perceive, “some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness.” No stain of guilt or responsibility attaches to her. She is not imperious, like the King, not headstrong, not intractable. The appeal to heredity is a variation of the appeal to realism, and is, in this context, equally and altogether inapposite. Shakespeare’s characters, unlike Eugene O‘Neill’s, have no antecedents. It is of no use to say that Cordelia is her father’s daughter. The reason she will not speak is because she cannot speak; and she cannot because the heart of a fool is in his mouth but the mouth of the wise is in his heart.

This is to say that the muteness of Cordelia (like the fantastic credulity of Gloucester) is not so much a reflection of character as it is the embodiment of an idea. Less real than symbolic, her affinity is more to a creature of fairy tale like Cinderella than to a heroine of the realistic drama like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. In delineating her behavior the playwright may be, psychologically, so penetrating and exact as really to catch the manners living as they rise: that is partly an extra, added attraction, over and above what we need. More important is his intention, not to portray a believable woman, but to dramatize the proposition that plainness is more than eloquence, that beauty is to be purchased by the weight, that meager lead, which rather threatens than promises aught, buys more than silver and gold.