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Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.

PAGE 265 KING LEAR it would be going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or allegory in King Lear, it does appear to disclose a mode of imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in the Fairy Queen.      This same tendency shows itself in King Lear in other forms. To it is due the idea of monstrosity -- of beings, actions, states of mind, which appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea, which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with unusual frequency in King Lear, for instance in the lines: Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child Than the sea-monster! or in the exclamation,                          Filial ingratitude! Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand For lifting food to't? It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in horror: Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame, Bemonster not thy feature. Were't my fitness To let these hands obey my blood, They are apt enough to dislocate and tear Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend, A woman's shape doth shield thee.'1    1The monstrosity here is a being with a woman's body and a fiend's soul. For the interpretation of the lines see Note Y.

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