Page 47 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xlii KIN G LEAR

But I cannot think that Shakespeare wants us to take
this too seriously. If Lear begot the evil daughters, and
if therefore the existence of their wickedness is his fault,
he also begot the virtuous daughter, whose moral beauty
must, by the same token, be put to his credit. I cannot
form the impression that Shakespeare wants us to
regard the play as involving an allegory in which the
good and evil elements that fight against each other in
the individual are made objective in the two types
of children. Such a contention might be defended, no
doubt: but more plausibly, surely, in the case of the
Gloucester family; for Edmund, unlike Goneril and
Regan, is illegitimate. Here is a patent difference
between the two plots. Gloucester has sinned in a way
in which Lear has not. Yet even so, I doubt if we are
meant to make too much of this delinquency in Glou-
cester. Taking the play as a whole, we cannot doubt that
Gloucester is more sinned against than sinning.
Shakespeare's management of main plot and under-
plot together is masterly. Circumstantial differences
between the two provide the interest of contrast, at the
same time as essential similarities make more emphatic
the complex 'message' of the play.
We have seen that at the start the sane Lear was really
mad, and that when he goes mad in the literal sense he
may in earnest be said to have begun to speak wisely.
Professor Heilman notes this paradox, and also the
corresponding paradox in the case of Gloucester. At the
start Gloucester could see with his eyes, but he lacked
full mental, moral, and spiritual vision. It is when he
loses his eyes, in the literal sense, that he begins to attain
this fundamental vision. The two paradoxes correspond.
And they are specifically related to each other. In I. I
Shakespeare, through Kent, presents Lear's folly in two
ways. Lear is sane, but he behaves madly; Lear has eyes,
but he is spiritually myopic. Subsequently Shakespeare