How Climax Meets Climax in the Centre of Lear (1885)

King Lear is one of the most complex of Shakespeare’s tragedies; its plot is made up of a number of separate actions, with their combinations accurately carried out, the whole impressing people with a sense of artistic involution similar to that of an elaborate musical fugue. Starting from the notion of pattern as a fundamental idea people have seen how Plot presents trains of events in human life taking form and shape as a crime and its nemesis, an oracle and its fulfilment, the rise and fall of an individual, or even simply as a story. Imperiousness seems to be the term appropriate to Lear’s conduct in the first scene. This is no case of dotage dividing an inheritance according to public declarations of affection. The division had already been made according to the best advice: in the case of two of the daughters “equalities had been so weighed that curiosity in neither could make choice of either’s moiety”.