ught is responsible, lastly, for a very striking
characteristic of _King Lear_--one in which it has no parallel except
_Timon_--the incessant references to the lower animals[144] and man's
likeness to them. These references are scattered broadcast through the
whole play, as though Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject
that he could hardly write a page without some allusion to it. The dog,
the horse, the cow, the sheep, the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf,
the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the civet-cat, the pelican, the owl,
the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the butterfly, the rat, the
mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-newt, the worm--I
am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of them are mentioned
again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the talk of Edgar
as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not seldom, even in
his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
qualities--'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in
madness, lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With
a more riotous appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared,
openly or implicitly, with one of them. Goneril is a kite: her
ingratitude has a serpent's tooth: she has struck her father most
serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied
sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her
husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have
the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not
daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered
with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a
mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with
fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany,
for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the
Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we
read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the
bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust,
deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their
feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, 'consider
him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the
transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for
jest,[145] seems to have been brooding on