Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

King Lear 133intellect would have proposed explanations of these. A less robustspirit would have permitted the dominant tone of the play to becomean eager or pathetic wistfulness respecting the significance of thesehard riddles in the destiny of man. Shakspere checks such wistfulcuriosity, though it exists discernibly; he will present life as it is. Iflife proposes inexplicable riddles, Shakspere’s art must propose themalso. But, while Shakspere will present life as it is, and suggest noinadequate explanations of its difficult problems, he will gaze at lifenot only from within, but, if possible, also from an extra-mundane,extra-human point of view, and, gazing thence at life, will try todiscern what aspect this fleeting and wonderful phenomenon presentsto the eyes of gods. Hence a grand irony in the tragedy of Lear ;hence all in it that is great is also small; all that is tragically sublimeis also grotesque. Hence it sees man walking in a vain shadow;groping in the mist; committing extravagant mistakes; wanderingfrom light into darkness; stumbling back again from darkness intolight; spending his strength in barren and impotent rages; man inhis weakness, his unreason, his affliction, his anguish, his povertyand meanness, his everlasting greatness and majesty. Hence, too, thecharacters, while they remain individual men and women, are ideal,representative, typical; Goneril and Regan, the destructive force,the ravening egoism in humanity which is at war with all goodness;Kent, a clear, unmingled fidelity; Cordelia, unmingled tendernessand strength, a pure redeeming ardor. As we read the play we arehaunted by a presence of something beyond the story of a sufferingold man; we become dimly aware that the play has some vast impersonalsignificance, like the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, and likeGoethe’s Faust. We seem to gaze upon “huge, cloudy symbols ofsome high romance.”What was irony when human life was viewed from the outside,extra-mundane point of view becomes, when life is viewed fromwithin, Stoicism. For to Stoicism the mere phenomenon of humanexistence is a vast piece of unreason and grotesqueness, and from thisunreason and grotesqueness Stoicism makes its escape by becomingindifferent to the phenomenon, and by devotion to the moral idea, thelaw of the soul, which is forever one with itself and with the highestreason. The ethics of the play of King Lear are Stoical ethics. Shakspere’sfidelity to the fact will allow him to deny no pain or calamity