ABSTRACT
Doubtless one cause of the play’s strong appeal today is that its “tragic-heroic” content, like that of most contemporary plays, is ambiguous and impure. This is not simply to refer to its well-known vein of grotesqueries, or those events and speeches which have the character of poignant farce and even of inspired music-hall fooling, like the Fool’s mouthings, Edgar’s gyrations, Gloucester’s leap. The play does blur the ordinary tragic-heroic norms. Consider the death of the protagonist, for instance. This is usually in Shakespeare climactic and distinctive, has sacrificial implications, dresses itself in ritual, springs from what people know to be a Renaissance mystique of stoical self-dominion. The miscellaneousness and very casualness of death in King Lear is perhaps also something to which the generations that have known Hiroshima are attuned. It goes without saying that in a world of such contentiousness most of the dramatis personae will be outrageously self-assured.
