Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

134William Shakespearethat befalls man. “There was never yet philosopher that could endurethe toothache patiently.” 1 He knows that it is impossible to“Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,Charm ache with air, and agony with words.”He admits the suffering, the weakness, of humanity; but he declaresthat in the inner law there is a constraining power stronger than asilken thread; in the fidelity of pure hearts, in the rapture of love andsacrifice, there is a charm which is neither air nor words, but, indeed,potent enough to subdue pain and make calamity acceptable. Cordelia,who utters no word in excess of her actual feeling, can declare, as sheis led to prison, her calm and decided acceptance of her lot:“We are not the firstWho, with best meaning, have incurred the worst;For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down;Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.” 2But though ethical principles radiate through the play of Lear, its chieffunction is not, even indirectly, to teach or inculcate moral truth, butrather, by the direct presentation of a vision of human life and of theenveloping forces of nature, to “free, arouse, dilate.” We may be unableto set down in words any set of truths which we have been taught bythe drama. But can we set down in words the precise moral significanceof a fugue of Handel or a symphony of Beethoven? We are kindledand aroused by them; our whole nature is quickened; it passes from thehabitual, hard, encrusted, and cold condition into “the fluid and attachingstate”—the state in which we do not seek truth and beauty, but attractand are sought by them; the state in which “good thoughts stand beforeus like free children of God, and cry ‘We are come.’ ” 3 The play or thepiece of music is not a code of precepts or a body of doctrine 4 ; it is “afocus where a number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.”In the play of King Lear we come into contact with the imagination,the heart, the soul of Shakspere, at a moment when they attainedtheir most powerful and intense vitality. “He was here,” Hazlitt wrote,“fairly caught in the web of his own imagination.” And being thusaroused about deeper things, Shakspere did not in this play feel thatmere historical verisimilitude was of chief importance. He found the