Much ink has been wasted about the "duration of time" in this play. The action of the play is one. It matters not if the time be divided into ten or fifty. In London and the University towns where writing is mostly practised, the play is seldom played. It is almost never played as Shakespeare meant it to be played. Those who write about it write after reading it. This is a reading age. Shakespeare's was an active age. That those who care most for his tragedies should be ignorant of the laws under which he worked is our misfortune and our fault and our disgrace.
The point is not insisted on; but some passages in the play suggest that when Shakespeare began to write it he was minded to make the action the falling of a judgment upon Desdemona for her treachery to her father. The treachery caused the old man's death. The too passionate and hasty things always bring death in these plays. Violent delights have violent ends and bring violent ends to others.
The poetry of _Othello_ is nearly as well known as that of _Hamlet_. Many quotations from the play have passed into the speech of the people. A play of intrigue does not give the fullest opportunity for great poetry; but supreme things are spoken throughout the action. Othello's cry--
"It is the very error of the moon. She comes more near the earth than she was wont And drives men mad,"
is one of the most perfect of all the perfect things in the tragedies.
_Source of the Plot._ The story of Lear is told in Holinshed's _Chronicles_, in a play by an unknown hand, _The True Chronicle History of King Leir_, and in a few stanzas of the tenth canto of the second Book of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_.
The character of Gloucester seems to have been suggested by the character of a blind king in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_.
_The Fable._ King Lear, in his old age, determines to give up his kingdom to his three daughters. Before he does so, he tries to assure himself of their love for him. The two elder women, Goneril and Regan, vow that they love him intensely; the youngest, Cordelia, can only tell him that she cares for him as a daughter should. He curses and casts off Cordelia, who is taken to wife by the King of France.
Gloucester, deceived by his bastard Edmund, casts off Edgar his son.