. William Shakespeare; poet, dramatist, and man . sublimest height. Thereis no more tragic figure in literature than that ofthe old king, accustomed to rule and flung out intothe night by the children among whom he hasdivided his power; intensely affectionate and wil-fully irrational; with all the majesty of a kingjoined to the passionateness of a child; his illu-sions destroyed, his reason unseated; with nocompanionship save that of the fool, wanderingshelterless in the storm, symbolical of the shatter-ing of his life in the awful tempest of passion. This Titanic drama, which ranks with the s
. William Shakespeare; poet, dramatist, and man . sublimest height. Thereis no more tragic figure in literature than that ofthe old king, accustomed to rule and flung out intothe night by the children among whom he hasdivided his power; intensely affectionate and wil-fully irrational; with all the majesty of a kingjoined to the passionateness of a child; his illu-sions destroyed, his reason unseated; with nocompanionship save that of the fool, wanderingshelterless in the storm, symbolical of the shatter-ing of his life in the awful tempest of passion. This Titanic drama, which ranks with the sub-limest work of yEschylus and Sophocles and standsalone in modern literature, was performed beforethe King at Whitehall, at Christmas-tide, story, in a condensed form, is found in Geoffrey 330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE of Monmouths Historia Britonum, and was de-rived from an old Welsh chronicle; some of themotives introduced into the legend appear in awide range of folk tales. Like Hamlet, theformative conception in King Lear has its foun-. THE HALL AT CLOPTON. dations deep in the vital experience of the race. Itis Celtic in its origin; but it found its setting inliterature at the hands of the old English chroniclers,Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert of Brunne,and, finally, of Holinshed, in whose pages Shake-speare read it. The story of Cordelia was told in versein The Mirrour for Magistrates and in The FaerieQueene, and had been dramatized at least fifteen THE LATER TRAGEDIES 331 years before Shakespeare dealt with it. The poetsattention may have been definitely drawn to thedramatic possibilities of this old story by a rudeplay which appeared in 1605, entitled The TrueChronicle History of King Leir and His ThreeDaughters — Gondrill, Ragan, and Cordelia ; aversion which, in the opinion of Dr. Ward, seemedonly to await the touch of such a hand as Shake-speares to become a tragedy of sublime effective-ness. This was precisely what Shakespeare, byomitting irrelevant par
Size: 1791px × 1395px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectshakesp, bookyear1901
