absent or
atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which
produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract
ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's
genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main
we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The
Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's
mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it would be
going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or
allegory in _King Lear_, it does appear to disclose a mode of
imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in
the _Fairy Queen_.

This same tendency shows itself in _King Lear_ in other forms. To it is
due the idea of monstrosity--of beings, actions, states of mind, which
appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea,
which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with
unusual frequency in _King Lear_, for instance in the lines:

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!

or in the exclamation,

Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't?

It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as
he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with
dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in
horror:

Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.
Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
A woman's shape doth shield thee.[143]

It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to
the description of Cordelia's grief:

It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and mate could not beget
Such different issues.

(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over
heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two
strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly
different products.)

This mode of tho