Page 24 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION xix
improbabilities in it than has any of the older versions'. 1
i
Yet I doubt whether the 'improbabilities' of . I
trouble any audience in the theatre; for the might of
Shakespeare's poetry conveys to our imaginations 'an
elemental human world', and we do not think altogether
in terms of commonplace probability. This is going to be
a huge, momentous, universal tragedy—essentially
different from the old Leir play in which, as Professor
Charlton says, 'the anonymous dramatist set the whole
scene in an atmosphere of everyday reasonable prob-
ability'. Consider the two elder sisters, for instance. In
the old play they are, as Charlton says again, 'common-
place in their littlenesses. They regard Cordelia as a
"proud pert Peat", mainly because she copies the cut of
all the new frocks which they put on so that they may
compete with her greater natural prettiness'. How
different is this from Shakespeare's presentation of two
moral monsters! What Goneril and Regan have in their
hearts is quintessential evil. Thus Shakespeare with-
draws from them the kind of real-life actuality which
they have in the old play. He makes them more im-
probable. But by the power of his imagination, and of
the poetry which expresses it, he makes them seem
frighteningly real to us in a deeper sense.
Professor Tucker Brooke declares 2 that in Shake-
speare's Lear 'the theme is bourgeois, in spite of the
rank of the protagonists; the vices portrayed are mean
and the virtues homely'. I cannot think that this is a
proper estimate. Professor Tucker Brooke's words are
indeed very applicable to the old play. But Shakespeare's
transformation of the old play lifts the story out of the
everyday bourgeois world and into the sphere of the
elemental.
1
Charlton, op. cit. p. 198.
* In A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh
(1948), . 536.
p