"Lear" is badly constructed, but worse was to come. The next tragedy,
"Timon," is merely a scream of pain, and yet it, too, has a deeper than
artistic interest for us as marking the utmost limit of Shakespeare's
suffering. The mortal malady of perhaps the finest spirit that has ever
appeared among men has an interest for us profounder than any tragedy.
And to find that in Shakespeare's agony and bloody sweat he ignores the
rules of artistry is simply what might have been expected, and, to some
of us, deepens the personal interest in the drama.
In "Lear" Edgar is peculiarly Shakespeare's mouthpiece, and to Edgar
Shakespeare gives some of the finest words he ever coined:
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us."
Here, too, in what Edgar says of himself, is the moral of all passion:
it is manifestly Shakespeare's view of himself:
"A most poor man, made tame to Fortune's blows,
Who by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows
Am pregnant to good pity."
Then we find the supreme phrase--perhaps the finest ever written:
"Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
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