ABSTRACT
The popularity of Tate’s adaptation was partly due to the fact that Cordelia’s death was not presented by Shakespeare as a necessary result of what had gone before. Shakespeare, almost as though he were writing a morality play, made the evil characters devilish and the good characters saintly. But despite this dramatic simplification, Lear is any old man: as Goethe said, “An aged man is always a King Lear.” The imagery corresponds with the actual suffering undergone by the characters. In the same way the blindness of Gloucester and the madness of Lear are both metaphorical and actual. Gloucester is spiritually blind at the beginning of the play. Lear acts as a madman, when he is ostensibly sane, and acquired wisdom by going mad. The two plots are built on these paradoxes and both come to a climax in the third act in which Gloucester’s blinding results from his rescue of Lear in the storm.
