been prominent in Shakespeare's mind
about this time.]

[Footnote 121: So the Quarto, and certainly rightly, though modern
editors reprint the feeble alteration of the Folio, due to fear of the
Censor, 'O heaven! O heavenly Powers!']

[Footnote 122: The feelings evoked by Emilia are one of the causes which
mitigate the excess of tragic pain at the conclusion. Others are the
downfall of Iago, and the fact, already alluded to, that both Desdemona
and Othello show themselves at their noblest just before death.]

LECTURE VII

KING LEAR

_King Lear_ has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully
his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas
except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him
best would pronounce for keeping _King Lear_.

Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the
least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a
curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate
altered _King Lear_ for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting
Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that
time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the
stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick
acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In
1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's
essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready
returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.

What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and
play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I
venture to doubt it. When I read _King Lear_ two impressions are left on
my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. _King
Lear_ seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me
_not_ his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two
rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama,
it appears to me, though in certain parts overwh