The Wheel of Fire by Knight G. Wilson; Knight G. Wilson;

The Wheel of Fire by Knight G. Wilson; Knight G. Wilson;

Author:Knight, G. Wilson; Knight, G. Wilson; [G. WILSON KNIGHT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00


the shrill-gorged lark

Cannot be heard so far

(iv. vi. 59)

and finally paints a fantastic picture of a ridiculously grotesque devil that stood with Gloucester on the edge:

As I stood here below, methought his eyes

Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,

Horns whelk’d and waved like the enridged sea;

It was some fiend . . .

(iv. vi. 70)

Some fiend, indeed.

There is masterful artistry in all this. The Gloucester-theme has throughout run separate from that of Lear, yet parallel, and continually giving us direct villainy where the other shows cold callousness; horrors of physical torment where the other has a subtle mental torment; culminating in this towering stroke of the grotesque and absurd to balance the fantastic incidents and speeches that immediately follow. At this point we suddenly have our first sight of Lear in the full ecstasy of his later madness. Now, when our imaginations are most powerfully quickened to the grotesque and incongruous, the whole surge of the Gloucester-theme, which has just reached its climax, floods as a tributary the main stream of our sympathy with Lear. Our vision has thus been uniquely focused to understand that vision of the grotesque, the incongruous, the fantastically-horrible, which is the agony of Lear’s mind:



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