The agitation of those who worry the details of the love test in an attempt to make it credible, which means to make it conformable to the canons of the realistic theater, is founded on their misapprehension of symbolic action.

When Cordelia is depicted as the last and least, it is not her slightness of stature that the dramatist is glancing at—or not that, decisively. He is preparing an ironic and a pregnant echo, to amplify Kent’s assertion, a little later:

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least (1.1.154)

But more than that, he is invoking the promise of Scripture, unspoken in the play, and yet close to the theme, which is the heart (but not the moral!) of the play: The first shall be last and the last shall be first. When Cordelia herself exclaims, as she prepares to engage the British powers, it is not altogether the realistic business of an imminent battle to which she is adverting. (Certainly that business does not much preoccupy Shakespeare.) And therefore we are not to wonder why the King of France was, so inopportunely, called back to his kingdom, nor whether Shakespeare’s allegiance or circumspection dictated the victory of the English. We want to catch in what is said an older saying, the sentence of the Evangelist, so much more than a literary reminiscence, and estimate accordingly the symbolic role the speaker plays: “Knew ye not that I must go about my father’s business.” It may be that Cordelia is that quintessence of womanhood celebrated reverentially (and with an appropriate silence as to particulars) by critics like A. W. Schlegel: “Of Cordelia’s heavenly beauty of soul, I do not dare to speak.” But it is not after all the literal woman to whom Shakespeare is holding up the mirror. Compare Beat-rice in Much Ado, or Rosalind in As You Like It.

O dear father,
It is thy business that I go about, (4.4.23-24)

It is a nice but an indispensable point to determine, just when the dramatist intends that the canons of ordinary realism are to be set aside or, better, transcended. Pretty clearly he wishes to transcend them when, in Act 2, Kent is made to sleep in the stocks, and Edgar, unmindful of him, to step forward and tell of his proposed transformation. Bradley is bemused: “One cannot help asking ... whether Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree ... to his father’s castle in order to soliloquize.” But Shakespeare, in juxtaposing the two characters, is not concerned with motivation or, certainly, with locale. No doubt the Bedlam is understood to remain on the heath. But precisely where he is, is not a question that ought to detain us. Neither are we to ask why he fails to perceive that someone else is up there with him on stage, in full view of the audience, and so, presumably, of himself; nor how Kent, for all his travails, can sleep undisturbed through twenty lines of blank verse. In the bringing together of the two good men, each of whom has been driven to the lowest and most dejected point of fortune, a dramatic emblem is achieved, a speaking picture, whose purport is not realistic but symbolic. What Shakespeare is after is this dark asssociation, or sequence:

A good man’s fortune may grow out at heels. (2.2.160)
Edgar I nothing am. (2.3.21)

In the same way the symbolic overtops the conventionally real when, in the final act, Edgar issues his challenge to Edmund. One is not to belabor the improbability of Edmund’s failure to recognize his brother, though, in point of fact, the failure is itself symbolic: the villain is indeed beguiled, and not because the plot demands this but because of his own willful behavior. But what is central to the scene is the intimation one hears, in the blast of the trumpet that announces the combat, of that final trump that vindicates the right and summons the perpetrator of wrong to the Judgment. When—another illustration—Edgar, opposing Oswald, assumes the character of a rustic, the clownish dialect he speaks is, realistically, absurd: what is its occasion ? Symbolically, however, it is deeply congruous. The power of truth is attested to, however ludicrous its aspect, and the frailty which is falsehood exposed, in this meeting of the ragged fellow, whose West Country accent gives him out to be a bumpkin, but who intrinsically merits and possesses all honors, and the gilded courtier, whose extrinsic show and sophistication betoken all honors and are as paste and cover to none.

The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. (3.4.146)

In Edgar’s vanquishing of Oswald, which is the triumph of the lowly and the unprepossessing over the world of robes and furred gowns, Lear’s great social speeches are enacted and answered.

A similar intention, to effect on stage a symbolic tableau, dictates the grouping of the protagonists at the end of the play. All are there in the resolution, occupying, I think, the same positions they assumed at first, and not least the wicked sisters, whose dead bodies are brought on, no doubt to exemplify this judgment of the heavens, but more, to direct the attention of the audience back and back, over all the dreadful ground that has been traced, to the opening scene. In their beginning is their ending. Perhaps the great wheel of the play, now come full circle, is impelled in its progress by something more than mechanical law.

What this other law may be is the central question Shakespeare poses and endeavors to answer. Lear, as is fitting, is made to enunciate it: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.236) But the question is not peculiar to Lear but is implicit in the utterance and conduct of all those who inhabit the darkness with him. Kent as Caius is interrogated by the King:

What art thou?
A man, sir. (10-11)

But what is it, to be a man? What is man to profess? To what law are his services bound? Gloucester interrogates Edgar: “Now, good sir, what are you?” and is answered:

A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows,
Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,
Am pregnant to good pity.