SOURCE: Asher, Lyell. “Lateness in King Lear.” Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 2 (2000): 209-28.

In the following essay, Lyell analyzes Lear's tragedy as it is delineated and compounded via the motif of lateness.

If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies … true, but the life that's left me will be long, the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. 

—Achilles, in The Iliad

Foolish the friends who called me happy then Whose fall shows how my foothold was unsure. 

—Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

—Bad enough! The same old story! When one has finished building one's houses, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began. The eternal distasteful “too late!” The melancholy of everything finished!— 

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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It is an axiom...