to the close student of life. Weakness and passion mingle in his love;
superstition and some faint, abortive motion of conscience unite to
torment him when dying.

There is a strangely lyric element about this great tragedy, an element
of heart-broken emotion hovering on the edge of passionate song. It is
like a great chorus in which the victims of treachery and ingratitude
blend their denouncing cries. The tremulous voice of Lear rises
terrible above all the others; and to his helpless curses the plaintive
satire of the fool answers like a mocking echo in halls of former
enjoyment. Thunder and lightning are the fearful accompaniment of the
song; and like faint antiphonal responses from the underplot come the
voices of the wronged Edgar and the outraged Gloucester.

+Date+.--The date of _King Lear_ lies between 1603 and 1606. In 1603
appeared a book (Harsnett's _Declaration of Egregious Popish
Impostures_) from which Shakespeare afterward drew {187} the names of
the devils in the pretended ravings of Edgar, together with similar
details. In 1606, as we know from an entry in the Stationers'
Register, the play was performed at Whitehall at Christmas. A late
edition of the old _King Leir_ (not Shakespeare's) was entered on the
Register May 8, 1605; and it is very plausible that Shakespeare's
tragedy was then having a successful run and that the old play was
revived to take advantage of an occasion when its story was popular.
Hence the date usually given for the composition of _King Lear_ is
1604-5. A quarto, with a poor text, and carelessly printed, appeared
in 1608; another, (bearing the assumed date of 1608) in 1619. The
First Folio text is much the best. Three hundred lines lacking in it
are made up for by a hundred lines absent from the quartos.

+Sources+.--The story of Lear in some form or another had appeared in
many writers before Shakespeare. The sources from which he drew
chiefly were probably the early accounts by Geoffrey of Moumouth, a
composite poem called _The Mirrour for Magistrates_, Holinshed's
_Chronicles_, Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, and lastly an old play of
_King Leir_, supposed to be the one acted in 1594. This old play ended
happily; Shakespeare first introduced the tragic ending. He also
invented Lear's madness, the banishment and disguise of Kent, and the
characters of Burgundy and the fool. The underplot he drew from the
story of the blind king of Paphlagonia in _Arcadia_, a lon