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Shakespeare's King Lear is often thought to be one of his most beautiful but most problematic plays. For nearly four centuries, literary artists and critics have agonized over the work, puzzled by its seeming irrationality and its loose dramatic structure. The poetry in the play is magnificent, and it is a rare person who can see the play without feeling profoundly moved. Yet discussions of why the play is so moving often founder, and some critics of the play, without a concept of unconscious motivation, come to judge it as an arbitrary and irksome miscalculation that needs to be altered. Like the nondynamic psychiatrist who sees the psychotic symptom as something to be eradicated or covered over with invasive measures rather than understood, many reputable literary thinkers have judged King Lear a failure and have brazenly attempted to fix it.
Leo Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare's play for having superfluous characters and false effects, and he stated that he preferred The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and earlier play which is assumed to have been one of Shakespeare's sources. Geothe held a similar view. In his essay “Shakespeare und kein Ende!” (1815), Goethe discussed the practice in nineteenth-century Germany of revising Shakespeare. One director, Schroeder, eliminated the first scene of King Lear, an action that Goethe found understandable.
Thus it is true that he changed the character of the play by removing the first scene of King Lear; but he was right, for in this scene Lear appears so absurd that in the rest of the play one cannot feel that his daughters are completely unjustified. The man carries on, but one doesn't sympathize with him, and Schroeder wanted to evoke sympathy as well as disgust with the daughters, who are certainly unnatural, but not completely reprehensible. In the old work [King Leir] which Shakespeare
Page 309revised, this scene brings out the most lovely effects as the play progresses” (p. 1007). [Translation mine.]
Thus, in the criticis