SOURCE: “I Know When One Is Dead, and When One Lives,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LXV, 1981, pp. 171-89.

In the following essay, originally presented in 1979, Craik reviews the final scene in King Lear together with scenes in other plays where Shakespeare treats life and death with dramatic ambiguity.

I am very grateful to the British Academy for inviting me to deliver this lecture. For my title I am indebted, obviously, to Shakespeare himself, but it was a colleague of mine at the University of Durham, Dr Derek Todd, who provided the stimulus. In his book I Am Not Prince Hamlet Dr Todd writes as follows:

‘I know when one is dead, and when one lives’, says Lear as he carries in Cordelia: a statement which turns out to be strangely false, for he alternates several times between believing her alive and believing her dead.¹

Dr...