this play which is dramatically disadvantageous. In
Shakespeare's dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the
Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact
locality of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often
unanswerable; but, as a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the
persons live and what their journeys are. The text makes this plain, for
example, almost throughout _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_; and the
imagination is therefore untroubled. But in _King Lear_ the indications
are so scanty that the reader's mind is left not seldom both vague and
bewildered. Nothing enables us to imagine whereabouts in Britain Lear's
palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany lives. In referring to the
dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy forests and
plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he studiously
avoids proper names. The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the absence of
information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find, from
the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a
surname, that he lives at Gloster (I. v. 1).[137] This seems likely to
be also the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is patron. But
no: it is a night's journey from Cornwall's 'house' to Gloster's, and
Gloster's is in the middle of an uninhabited heath.[138] Here, for the
purpose of the crisis, nearly all the persons assemble, but they do so
in a manner which no casual spectator or reader could follow. Afterwards
they all drift towards Dover for the purpose of the catastrophe; but
again the localities and movements are unusually indefinite. And this
indefiniteness is found in smaller matters. One cannot help asking, for
example, and yet one feels one had better not ask, where that 'lodging'
of Edmund's can be, in which he hides Edgar from his father, and whether
Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree (in a district
where 'for many miles about there's scarce a bush') to his father's
castle in order to soliloquise (II. iii.):--for the favourite
stage-direction, 'a wood' (which is more than 'a bush'), however
convenient to imagination, is scarcely compatible with the presence of
Kent asleep in the stocks.[139] Something of the confusion which
bewilders the reader's mind in _King Lear_ recurs in _Antony and
Cleopatra_, the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies; but
there it is due not so much to the absence or vaguen