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Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.
PAGE 272
KING LEAR

Gloster:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport;

Edgar:

Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.

Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power. And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought, often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm seems the messenger of heaven:

                             Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes. . . .

At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:

                  Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just;

and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV. i. 67 ff.). Gloster again, thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,

                             but I shall see
The winged vengeance overtake such children.

The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished. One cries,

I'll never care what wickedness I do,
If this man come to good;

and another,

                       if she live long,
And in the end meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.

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