ABSTRACT
The desperate painfulness of the tragic ending of King Lear led the stage, when the brave Elizabethan days were past, to accept for almost two hundred years Tate’s sentimentalized version with a happy ending, Lear surviving and Cordelia suitably married to Edgar. Shakespeare’s story, at any rate, had a conclusion in which everything was concluded, and if Cordelia was hanged, she did not hang herself as in Holinshed. The story of Sir William Allen is merely desperate, it would seem, and totally devoid of that measure of poetic justice which marks the story that came to Shakespeare from Holinshed. The only philosophy that can possibly see in King Lear the mere fall of black night upon a shipwreck of human life and love is materialism, which encloses life within final limits of time and space. As the action develops, Lear himself is led to consider power more closely, and with it justice, the sword of power.
