ess of the
indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing
journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help himself in
the Roman play: in _King Lear_ he did not choose to help himself,
perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.

From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must
be familiar to many readers of _King Lear_. It is far more difficult to
retrace in memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _Macbeth_. The outline is of course quite clear;
anyone could write an 'argument' of the play. But when an attempt is
made to fill in the detail, it issues sooner or later in confusion even
with readers whose dramatic memory is unusually strong.[140]

2

How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are
either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?
As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that _King
Lear_ possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its
defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects
of a wider kind. And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find
among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically
faulty or injurious. Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples
of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just
considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the
number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the
clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for
imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a
scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately,
of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to us,
partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom;
and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful
pity,--sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only
for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called
Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the
place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and
Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where
Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in
gran dispitto.'

Consider next the double ac