Page 41 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xxxvi KING LEAR
your nay, nay, lest ye fall into condemnation.'" The
sense of common humanity that Lear acquires expresses
itself in a rebuke uttered to an imaginary beadle thrashing
an imaginary whore:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore ? Strip thy own back}
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp'st her. (4. 6. 159-62)

"We cannot hear or read these words without recalling
the words of Christ to those who spoke to him of how,
according to the law, the woman taken in adultery
'
should be stoned: He that is without sin among
you, let him first cast a stone at her' (St John viii, 7);
and we remember also the first verse of the second
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans—'Therefore
thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art
that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou
condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the
same things.'
Lear's sufferings reach their climax in the storm, and
the storm is the heart of the play. Its faint beginnings are
to be found in the old play of Leir. Here a 'Messenger
or murtherer' is instructed by Ragan to kill Leir and
Perillus (=Kent). He is about to do so. Leir and
Perillus try to dissuade him. Perillus describes to him
the pains of hell, and at that moment 'it thunders'. The
messenger 'quakes, and lets fall the Dagger'. Leir and
Perillus are saved. In the source-play, then, we have
thunder and lightning which would appear to be the
voice of the Divine intervening to save Leir and his
friend: on a lower level, it serves as a mechanical device
to keep alive a hero destined to survive and to repossess
his crown. This thunder and lightning Shakespeare
transforms into his own mighty tempest, which has
much more remarkable dramatic functions. The dis-