SOURCE: Goldman, Michael. “The Worst of King Lear.” In Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, pp. 94-108. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.

In the following essay, Goldman argues that King Lear is essentially a play about suffering.

At the end of IV, i of King Lear, Gloucester directs Edgar to take him to Dover. His words, like so many in the play, seem to have a wide and rich application to its entire action:

There is a cliff, whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in the confined deep. Bring me but to the very brim of it, And I'll repair the misery thou dost bear With something rich about me. 

(76-80)

Taken by themselves, these lines constitute a little poem on the nature of tragedy. Like Lear, in whom Nature stands on the verge of her confine, Gloucester is made to see (in spite of his...