ABSTRACT
Everything in King Lear is on the grand scale. Action, characterization, and language are all remarkable for boldness and daring. The action begins with a violent improbability, which the author does nothing to prepare for or mitigate. People take it in the stride, carried forward by the poignancy of the situation and the clash of opposites, nakedly presented: Age against Youth; Volubility against Silence; Falseness against Truth. The action includes, again without any mitigation, the extreme of physical horror in the blinding of Gloucester; and the extreme of indignity is inflicted on its heroes in the grotesque scenes of Gloucester’s attempted suicide and Lear’s mad capers. The boldness of the action and the characterization are matched by the boldness of the language. It ranges from speech of great complexity and rhetorical force to speech of utter simplicity, including babbling prose and doggerel song in its range.
