ABSTRACT
Tragedy is said to be remorseless, though very few tragedies are. Bradley made his order outside the play, as was his habit, by reflecting on the emotional experience of reading it; and perhaps he was right to do so. Later critics—James, Knights, and especially Heilman—have felt obliged to find it in the play, and do so by fastening on one or another cadence without reference to the process of the play which invalidated it. The greatness of King Lear is in the perfect completeness of its negation, and in the superb energy with which it is enforced. Action and reaction are equal and opposite: that very energy, the sense of life in the presentation of death, is the source of all this impulse to affirm. But Bradley was surely right that the affirmation must come after the play; and to state it will always be wrong, always be a failure to hold to what this play really is.
