enter. Lear sees Kent in the stocks and, still not recognising him, is inflamed with anger against those who have dared so to treat his messenger, and he calls for the Duke and Regan. The fool goes on with his queer sayings. Lear with difficulty restrains his anger. The Duke and Regan enter. Lear complains of Goneril, but Regan justifies her sister. Lear curses Goneril and, when Regan tells him he had better go back to her sister, he is indignant and says: “Ask her forgiveness?” and goes on his knees, showing how improper it would be for him abjectly to beg food and clothing as charity from his own daughter, and he curses Goneril with the most terrible curses, and asks who has dared to put his messenger in the stocks. Before Regan can answer Goneril arrives. Lear becomes yet more angry and again curses Goneril, and when he is told that the Duke had ordered the stocks he says nothing, for at this moment Regan tells him that she cannot receive him now and that he had better return with Goneril, and in a month’s time she will herself receive him but not with a hundred but with only fifty followers. Lear again curses Goneril and does not want to go with her, still hoping that Regan will receive him with all his hundred followers, but Regan says she will only accept him with twenty-five, and then Lear decides to go back with Goneril who allows fifty. Then, when Goneril says that even twenty-five are too many, Lear utters a long discourse about the superfluous and sufficient being conditional conceptions, and says that if a man is allowed only as much as is necessary he is no different from a beast. And here Lear, or rather the actor who plays Lear, addresses himself to a finely-dressed woman in the audience, and says that she too does not need her finery, which does not keep her warm. After this he becomes madly angry, says that he will do something terrible to be revenged upon his daughters but will not weep, and so he departs. The noise of a storm that is commencing is heard.

Such is the second Act, full of unnatural occurrences, and still more unnatural speeches not flowing from the speaker’s circumstances, and finishing with the scene between Lear and his daughters which might be powerful if it were not overloaded with speeches most naïvely absurd and unnatural and quite inappropriate moreover, put in Lear’s mouth. Exceedingly touching would be Lear’s vacillations between pride, anger, and hope of concessions from his daughters, were they not spoilt by these verbose absurdities which he utters about being ready to divorce Regan’s dead mother should Regan not be glad to see him, or about evoking “fen-sucked fogs” to infect his daughter, or about the heavens being obliged to protect old men as they themselves are old, and much else.