From King Lear to the Tempest1

(Some conclusions taken from a study in progress on The Cyclic Movement in Shakespeare's Plays)

I re-read some months ago Shakespeare's plays King Lear and The Tempest, in that order, without any conscious intention of either linking them together or making any psycho-analytical study. It interested me to find that there was an interval of seven years between the creation of a tragedy in which there is a storm, and The Tempest, the last romantic play which begins with a storm. Might they not have a psychological relationship?

My interest canalized when I subsequently re-read A Short Life of Shakespeare with the Sources, abridged by C. Williams from Sir Edmund Chambers' William Shakespeare: a Study of Facts and Problems. Sir Edmund Chambers says (p. 61): '… the transition from the tragedies to the romances is not an evolution but a revolution. There has been some mental process such as the psychology of religion would call a conversion'.

To that conclusion I finally arrived myself after further study of these two plays, giving to the word 'revolution' first of all the literal translation of 'revolving', i.e. a psychical re-volution experienced by the author and communicated through poetic drama.

I hope to demonstrate this more fully from the texts in a completed study of the plays. I postulate that The Tempest is the psychological sequence of King Lear and that both plays are linked together in a cycle of inner experiences, a cycle which seems characteristic of creative artists.

The selected plays have the common factor of 'storm'. King Lear is the author's most massive achievement in tragedy, while The Tempest is the last romantic comedy.

My argument runs: King Lear stands on a bank that runs steeply down to the Slough of Despond. The 'storm' represents the rage before the onset of depression. In Timon of Athens the hero commits suicide. This is the nadir of the revolutionary cycle. Prospero in The Tempest stands on the hither bank representing the re-emergen