Nature herself,
we might say, is revealed--and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a
world as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos might
come again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare's work or in the universe of
jarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so
sharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so
mould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing from
the abnormal into the monstrous: yet even as much as this, at least in
all cases but one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone would it
be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile
than it was devilish. Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-
flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted
goodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all
that the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her
imperious and dauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes of
her "milk-livered" and "moral fool" the coming banners of France about
the "plumed helm" of his slayer.
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