We have seen
in OTHELLO, how the unsuspecting frankness and impetuous passions of
the Moor are played upon and exasperated by the artful dexterity of
Iago. In the present play, that which aggravates the sense of
sympathy in the reader, and of uncontrollable anguish in the swollen
heart of Lear, is the petrifying indifference, the cold,
calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters. His keen
passions seem whetted on their stony hearts. The contrast would be
too painful, the shock too great, but for the intervention of the
Fool, whose well-timed levity comes in to break the continuity of
feeling when it can no longer be borne, and to bring into play again
the fibres of the heart just as they are growing rigid from over-
strained excitement. The imagination is glad to take refuge in the
half-comic, half-serious comments of the Fool, just as the mind
under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents itself in
sallies of wit. The character was also a grotesque ornament of the
barbarous times, in which alone the tragic ground-work of the story
could be laid. In another point of view it is indispensable,
inasmuch as while it is a diversion to the too great intensity of
our disgust, it carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it
is capable, by showing the pitiable weakness of the old king's
conduct and its irretrievable consequences in the most familiar
point of view.
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