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What shall I do with this absurdity—O Heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,Decrepit age that has been tied to meAs to a dog's tail?Never had I moreExcited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible.
The problem of king lear has engaged many critics. Nahum Tate provided a happy ending which played for 150 years. Charles Lamb thought it essentially impossible to present on stage. Bradley felt it was too huge, that it dwarfed the actors trying to play it. Coleridge considered the opening scene—with Lear's lack of judgment, his rashness, his choleric temper—to be a totally implausible basis for laying in the subsequent plot.
Tolstoy felt Shakespeare had traduced his sources. But the play works, and perhaps it has required a kind of modern sensibility, brought to the working of the play, to bring about the fit between audience and play. Shakespeare combines a masterly psychology with his unsurpassed poetic and dramatic gift.