may have used. We
know of no English translation until {185} years after Shakespeare
died. Many details are changed in the play, and the whole story is
raised to a far nobler plane. In the original the heroine is beaten to
death with a stocking filled with sand; Othello is tortured, but
refuses to confess, and later is murdered by his wife's revengeful
kinsmen. This crude, bloody, and long-drawn-out story is in striking
contrast with the masterly ending of the tragedy.

+King Lear+.--As _Romeo and Juliet_ shows the tragedy of youth, so
_Lear_ shows the tragedy of old age. King Lear has probably been a
good and able man in his day; but now time has impaired his judgment,
and he is made to suffer fearfully for those errors for which nature,
and not he, is to blame. Duped by the hypocritical smoothness of his
two elder daughters, he gives them all his lands and power; while his
youngest daughter Cordelia, who truly loves him, is turned away because
she is too honest to humor an old man's whim. The result is what might
have been expected. Lear has put himself absolutely into the power of
his two older daughters, who are the very incarnation of heartlessness
and ingratitude. By their inhuman treatment he is driven out into the
night and storm, exposing his white head to a tempest so fierce that
even the wild beasts refuse to face it. As a result of exposure and
mental suffering, his mind becomes unhinged. At last his daughter
Cordelia finds him, gives him refuge, and nurses him back to reason and
hope. But this momentary gleam of light only makes darker by contrast
the end which closely follows, where Cordelia is killed by treachery
and Lear dies broken-hearted.

The fate of Lear finds a parallel in that of {186} Gloucester in the
underplot. Like his king, this nobleman has proved an unwise father,
favoring the treacherous child and disowning the true. He also is made
to pay a fearful penalty for his mistakes, ending in his death. But he
is represented as more justly punished, less excusable through the
weaknesses of age; and for this reason his grief appeals to us as an
intensifying reflection of Lear's misery rather than as a rival for
that in our sympathy. The character of Edmund shows some likeness to
that of Richard III; and a comparison of the two will show how
Shakespeare has developed in the interval. Both are stern, able, and
heartless; but Edmund unites to these more complex feelings known only