Page 53 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xlviii K I N G L E A R
tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the
flesh of each is covered with the fell of a beast As we read,
the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered
the bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom,
savagery, lust, deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness....
When Edgar, play-acting destitution and crazed wits,
pretends that in his past life he has been evil, he attaches
an animal name to each of his delinquencies: he has been

hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in mad-
ness, lion in prey. (3. 4. 92-3)

Evil in this play is conceived in terms of horrible besti-
ality, as it is in Othello also.

X. The Play's 'Pessimism'

What, as Shakespeare sees it in King Lear, is the rela-
tionship between mankind and the power or powers
which govern the universe?
We hear much in the play about astrology. That man's
fate lies not in his own keeping but under the control of
the stars was, of course, a commonly held medieval view:
it is part of an old-established tradition which, as we see
in 1. 2, Gloucester accepts. Edmund, the 'new man',
rejects it. In the essay in the Adams Memorial Studies to
which I have referred, Professor Bald deals excellently
with Shakespeare's probable attitude to Gloucester's
and Edmund's views. Acknowledging indebtedness to
Professor D. C. Allen, Professor Bald speaks of Shake-
speare's attitude—

While he would have hesitated to deny that the stars could
affect men's lives, there is nothing to suggest that he had so
much faith in their influence as to deny the freedom of the
will. Free-will is of the essence of tragedy, which cannot
exist under determinism, and astrology is only a crude form