age of authority': V. iii. 186, 'taught me to
shift Into a madman's rags; to assume a semblance That very dogs
disdain'd.' Cf. _Oxford Lectures_, p. 341.]

[Footnote 147: With this compare the following lines in the great speech
on 'degree' in _Troilus and Cressida_, I. iii.:

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.]

[Footnote 148: Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of
imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the
stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He
may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case
have written to satisfy his own imagination. I have taken no notice of
the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear. The matter is too
huge, and too strictly poetic, for analysis. I may observe that in our
present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three
Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect. Shakespeare,
as we saw (p. 49), interposed between them short scenes of much lower
tone.]

[Footnote 149: 'justice,' Qq.]

[Footnote 150: =approve.]

[Footnote 151: The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this
speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.]

[Footnote 152: The gods are mentioned many times in _King Lear_, but
'God' only here (V. ii. 16).]

[Footnote 153: The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent
his personal feelings and attitude, and the changes in them, would carry
us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for
the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I
have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it
only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'

There are here two distinct sets of facts