Such is this celebrated play. Absurd as it may appear in this rendering (which I have tried to make as impartial as possible), I can confidently say that it is yet more absurd in the original. To any man of our time, were he not under the hypnotic influence of the suggestion that this play is the height of perfection, it would be enough to read it to the end, had he patience to do so, to convince himself that far from being the height of perfection it is a very poor, carelessly constructed work which, if it may have been of interest to a certain public of its own day, can among us evoke nothing but aversion and weariness. And any man of our day free from such suggestion would receive just the same impression from the other much praised dramas of Shakespeare, not to speak of the absurd dramatised tales, _Pericles_, _Twelfth Night_, _The Tempest_, _Cymbeline_, and _Troilus and Cressida_.

But such free-minded people, not pre-disposed to Shakespeare worship, are no longer to be found in our time and in our Christian society. Into every man of our society and time, from an early period of his conscious life, has been instilled the idea that Shakespeare is a poetic and dramatic genius and that all his works are the height of perfection. And therefore, superfluous as it would seem, I will try to indicate in the play of _King Lear_ which I have chosen, the defects characteristic of all Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, as a result of which they not only fail to furnish models of dramatic art but fail to satisfy the most elementary and generally recognised requirements of art.

According to the laws laid down by those very critics who extol Shakespeare, the conditions of every tragedy are that the persons who appear should, as a result of their own characters, actions, and the natural movement of events, be brought into conditions in which, finding themselves in opposition to the world around them, they should struggle with it and in that struggle display their inherent qualities.

In the tragedy of _King Lear_ the persons represented are indeed externally placed in opposition to the surrounding world and struggle against it. But the struggle does not result from a natural course of events and from their own characters, but is quite arbitrarily arranged by the author, and therefore cannot produce on the reader that illusion which constitutes the chief condition of art. Lear is under no necessity, and has no reason, to resign his power. And having lived all their lives with his daughters he also has no reason to believe the words of the two elder, and not to believe the truthful statement of the youngest; yet on this the whole tragedy of his position is built.

Equally unnatural is the secondary and very similar plot: the relation of Gloucester to his sons. The position of Gloucester and Edgar arises from the fact that Gloucester, just like Lear, immediately believes the very grossest deception, and does not even try to ask the son who had been deceived, whether the accusation against him is true, but curses him and drives him away.

The fact that the relation of Lear to his daughters is just the same as that of Gloucester to his sons, makes one feel even more strongly that they are both arbitrarily invented and do not flow from the characters or the natural course of events. Equally unnatural and obviously invented is the fact that all through the play Lear fails to recognise his old courtier, Kent; and so the relations of Lear and Kent fail to evoke the sympathy of reader or hearer. This applies in an even greater degree to the position of Edgar, whom nobody recognises, who acts as guide to his blind father and persuades him that he has leapt from a cliff when Gloucester has really jumped on level ground.

These positions in which the characters are quite arbitrarily placed are so unnatural that the reader or spectator is unable either to sympathise with their sufferings or even to be interested in what he reads or hears. That in the first place.

Secondly, there is the fact that both in this and in Shakespeare’s other dramas all the people live, think, speak, and act, quite out of accord with the given period and place. The action of _King Lear_ takes place 800 years B. C., and yet the characters in it are placed in conditions possible only in the Middle Ages: Kings, dukes, armies, illegitimate children, gentlemen, courtiers, doctors, farmers, officers, soldiers, knights in armour, and so on, appear in it. Perhaps such anachronisms (of which all Shakespeare’s plays are full) did not infringe the possibility of illusion in the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, but in our time it is no longer possible to interest oneself in the development of events one knows could not have occurred in the conditions the author describes in detail.

The artificiality of the positions, which do not arise from a natural course of events and from the characters of the people engaged, and their incompatibility with the period and the place, is further increased by the coarse embellishments Shakespeare continually makes use of in passages meant to be specially touching. The extraordinary storm during which Lear roams about the heath, or the weeds which for some reason he puts on his head, as Ophelia does in _Hamlet_, or Edgar’s attire--all these effects, far from strengthening the impression, produce a contrary effect. “_Man sieht die Absicht und man wird verstimmt_”[139] as Goethe says. It often happens--as for instance with such obviously intentional effects as the dragging out of half-a-dozen corpses by the legs, with which Shakespeare often ends his tragedies--that instead of feeling fear and pity one feels the absurdity of the thing.