his life with his daughters, has no reason to believe the words of
the two elders and not the truthful statement of the youngest; yet
upon this is built the whole tragedy of his position.

Similarly unnatural is the subordinate action: the relation of
Gloucester to his sons. The positions of Gloucester and Edgar flow
from the circumstance that Gloucester, just like Lear, immediately
believes the coarsest untruth and does not even endeavor to inquire of
his injured son whether what he is accused of be true, but at once
curses and banishes him. The fact that Lear's relations with his
daughters are the same as those of Gloucester to his sons makes one
feel yet more strongly that in both cases the relations are quite
arbitrary, and do not flow from the characters nor the natural course
of events. Equally unnatural, and obviously invented, is the fact that
all through the tragedy Lear does not recognize his old courtier,
Kent, and therefore the relations between Lear and Kent fail to excite
the sympathy of the reader or spectator. The same, in a yet greater
degree, holds true of the position of Edgar, who, unrecognized by any
one, leads his blind father and persuades him that he has leapt off a
cliff, when in reality Gloucester jumps on level ground.

These positions, into which the characters are placed quite
arbitrarily, are so unnatural that the reader or spectator is unable
not only to sympathize with their sufferings but even to be interested
in what he reads or sees. This in the first place.

Secondly, in this, as in the other dramas of Shakespeare, all the
characters live, think, speak, and act quite unconformably with the
given time and place. The action of "King Lear" takes place 800 years
B.C., and yet the characters are placed in conditions possible only in
the Middle Ages: participating in the drama are kings, dukes, armies,
and illegitimate children, and gentlemen, courtiers, doctors, farmers,
officers, soldiers, and knights with vizors, etc. It is possible that
such anachronisms (with which Shakespeare's dramas abound) did not
injure the possibility of illusion in the sixteenth century and the
beginning of the seventeenth, but in our time it is no longer possible
to follow with interest the development of events which one knows
could not take place in the conditions which the author describes in
detail. The artificiality of the positions, not flowing from the
natural course of events, or from the nature of th