Lear says:
"I am a man,
More sinn'd against than sinning,"
and the new-coined phrase passed at once into the general currency. Who,
too, can ever forget his description of the poor?
"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?"
The like of that "looped and windowed raggedness" is hardly to be found
in any other literature. In the fourth and fifth acts Lear's language is
simplicity itself, and even in that third act which Tolstoi condemns as
"incredibly pompous and artificial," we find him talking naturally:
"Ha! here 's three on's are sophisticated: thou art
the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but
such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."
There is still another reason why some of us cannot read "Lear" with the
cold eyes of reason, contemptuously critical. "Lear" marks a stage in
Shakespeare's agony.
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