m the natural course of events nor from their
own characters, but is quite arbitrarily established by the author, and
therefore can not produce on the reader the illusion which represents
the essential condition of art.

Lear has no necessity or motive for his abdication; also, having lived
all 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 sevent