[Footnote 184:  Who, like Kent, hastens on the quarrel with Goneril.]

[Footnote 185:  I do not wish to complicate the discussion by examining the differences, in degree or otherwise, in the various cases, or by introducing numerous qualifications; and therefore I do not add the names of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.]

[Footnote 186:  It follows from the above that, if this idea were made explicit and accompanied our reading of a tragedy throughout, it would confuse or even destroy the tragic impression.  So would the constant presence of Christian beliefs.  The reader most attached to these beliefs holds them in temporary suspension while he is immersed in a Shakespearean tragedy.  Such tragedy assumes that the world, as it is presented, is the truth, though it also provokes feelings which imply that this world is not the whole truth, and therefore not the truth.]

[Footnote 187:  Though Cordelia, of course, does not occupy the position of the hero.]

[Footnote 188:  E.g. in King Lear the servants, and the old man who succours Gloster and brings to the naked beggar ’the best ’parel that he has, come on’t what will,’ i.e. whatever vengeance Regan can inflict.  Cf. the Steward and the Servants in Timon.  Cf. there also (V. i. 23), ‘Promising is the very air o’ the time ... performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying [performance of promises] is quite out of use.’  Shakespeare’s feeling on this subject, though apparently specially keen at this time of his life, is much the same throughout (cf.  Adam in As You Like It).  He has no respect for the plainer and simpler kind of people as politicians, but a great respect and regard for their hearts.]

[Footnote 189:  ‘I stumbled when I saw,’ says Gloster.]

[Footnote 190:  Our advantages give us a blind confidence in our security.  Cf. Timon, IV. iii. 76,

     Alc. I have heard in some sort of thy miseries.

     Tim. Thou saw’st them when I had prosperity.]

[Footnote 191:  Biblical ideas seem to have been floating in Shakespeare’s mind.  Cf. the words of Kent, when Lear enters with Cordelia’s body, ‘Is this the promised end?’ and Edgar’s answer, ’Or image of that horror?’ The ‘promised end’ is certainly the end of the world (cf. with ‘image’ ‘the great doom’s image,’ Macbeth, II. iii. 83); and the next words, Albany’s ‘Fall and cease,’ may be addressed to the heavens or stars, not to Lear.  It seems probable that in writing Gloster’s speech about the predicted horrors to follow ’these late eclipses’ Shakespeare had a vague recollection of the passage in Matthew xxiv., or of that in Mark xiii., about the tribulations which were to be the sign of ‘the end of the world.’ (I do not mean, of course, that the ‘prediction’ of I. ii. 119 is the prediction to be found in one of these passages.)]