Page 60 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION lv
Here is a glimpse of the octogenarian Lear as he was
before he had grown up to full manhood—flattered long
ago, as he is at the start of the play. He himself brings his
youthful days before us. In a review praising a produc-
tion by Mr (now Sir Donald) Wolfit, Mr T. C. Worsley
1
wrote, in 1949, these words:
Every time I have read the play, and every other time I have
seen it acted, I have always had to swallow that first scene
of the dividing of the kingdom, taking its nasty premise as
one takes a dose for the good it will do one later. But with
Mr Wolfit it is quite otherwise. What the very first three
minutes manage marvellously to convey is the whole
history of the man that has led up to them; so that we are
dropped immediately not into a beginning but into a
climax.

The play looks before and after. Briefly, admittedly; for
it is the climax with which it is concerned—a climax
which itself has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The
middle compels us to keep watch over human suffering
that is appalling in its intensity. We cannot forget that
suffering when all is over—we cannot brush it out of our
minds. But the gods are merciful, and we discern the
glimmerings of a new sunrise. We are by no means left
darkling.

* The New Statesman and Nation, new ser. xxxvin, 354
(1 October 1949).
G. I. D.
June 1957