Paul A. Cantor, University of Virginia

What is the price of Experience do men buy
 it for a song
 Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it
 is bought with the price
 Of all that a man hath his house his wife
 his children.

—William Blake, The Four Zoas

I

Many critics regard King Lear as the greatest of Shakespeare's plays and also as his most tragic. Indeed, many would claim that it is the most tragic play ever written. And yet, curiously, in most critical accounts of the play it is difficult to see why we should even regard it as tragic at all, whether we are using an Aristotelian or a Hegelian definition of tragedy. In the view of most critics, Lear is basically a pathetic old man, vain and foolish, rash in his judgment and incapable of controlling his emotions—and he is...