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Updated: May 28, 2025
When power bowed to flattery, honor was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him whose life was already at his service? That should not hinder duty from speaking.
As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies' bonnets, and the many descriptions of the mundus muliebris, from the long of Autolycus in the Winter's Tale down to the account of the Duchess of Milan's gown in Much Ado About Nothing, they are far too numerous to quote; though it may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in Lear's scene with Edgar a passage which has the advantage of brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing metaphysics of Sartor Resartus.
"Society," said Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical hint from a paragraph in Swift's Tale of a Tub: "A sect was established who held the universe to be a large suit of clothes....If certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop."
Lear did not long survive this kind child. Before he died, the good Earl of Kent, who had still attended his old master's steps from the first of his daughters' ill usage to this sad period of his decay, tried to make him understand that it was he who had followed him under the name of Caius; but Lear's care-crazed brain at that time could not comprehend how that could be, or how Kent and Caius could be the same person: so Kent thought it needless to trouble him with explanations at such a time; and Lear soon after expiring, this faithful servant to the king, between age and grief for his old master's vexations, soon followed him to the grave.
But his laugh and his test so increased my confusion that, in fine, that was the first and last time I ever did protest! Like Lear's Cordelia, I was tongue-tied I had no words to assure him. Sometimes I wept to think how poor I was in resources to make him happy. Then came another annoyance my name and fame were freely discussed at the fort." "A natural consequence," sighed Herbert.
The woman who, according to Lear's fool, was wont to thrust her live eels into the hot paste, "rapping them o' the coxcombs with a stick and crying reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!" had the spirit of a true inquisitor. Even so dealt Titelmann with his heretics writhing on the rack or in the flames.
Podge Byerly was broken down and dangerously ill at her mother's little house. All of Agnes's callers had dropped off, and she felt that she could no longer worship, except as a show, at Van de Lear's church; but this deprivation only deepened Agnes's natural devotion.
His object was the object attained by Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear's "Do not laugh at me, For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia." Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality, the getting back of common speech into poetry.
There was no help for it; and so easy is the descent of Avernus Geake's unaccustomed wits were already wandering in a wilderness of improbable falsehoods, when he heard the sound of wheels up the road, and Long Oliver came along in Farmer Lear's red-wheeled trap and behind Farmer Lear's dun-coloured mare.
On the seeming improbability of Lear's conduct it may be observed, that he is represented according to histories at that time vulgarly received as true. And perhaps if we turn our thoughts upon the barbarity and ignorance of the age to which this story is referred, it will appear not so unlikely as while we estimate Lear's manners by our own.
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