emotional effect caused him to omit one motive that modern renovators have never been able to forego. He found a place for battles, villany, childish intrigue, the clown's songs and jests, the plucking out of Gloster's eyes, and the protracted foolery between Edgar and his helpless father, but he refused to admit romantic love into this drama of the madness that separates father and child. Though Shakespeare chose to involve himself in these manifold difficulties of story and structure, he hardly felt his fetters. No play depends less on mere incident and event. The inconsistencies and confusion of the action are forgotten in the wild turmoil of human passions. Wild, terrible, elementary, brutal, grotesque, or sublime,--everything in the play is touched with the imaginative truth that gives it limitless range of suggestion, applicable to any discord of parents and children or to the most dreadful spiritual torture. Insanity, long a favorite theme of Elizabethan tragedy, and fantastic grotesqueness, often its bane, summon his imagination to its most wonderful creation when the feigning Bedlam counters the mad king mid the jests of the fool and the havoc of the storm. Such a conception could have been attempted only in an age which took its emotions strong and mixed, which found insanity a subject for laughter as well as horror, and which refused to limit the imagination by reason or rule. In that age a lesser than Shakespeare might have formed the bare design of making his audience laugh at the fool and poor Tom, and shudder at the eyeless Gloster and the raving Ancient. Something akin to it may be found in many scenes, in that in which Marlowe's emperor and empress dash out their brains against the bars of their cage in a frenzy of humiliation, or that in which Webster's duchess stands undazzled amid the dancing ring of obscene maniacs. The Elizabethan drama had prepared the opportunity for the full and terrible presentation of the discords and agony of a breaking mind. The London audience was ready for the scenes on the heath.