Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

At the climax of King Lear, the old king’s wicked daughters are defeated, and, after all his losses and his atrocious sufferings, the king is restored to “absolute power” (5.3.299). But it is too late: his beloved daughter Cordelia is dead in his arms, and he dies in an agony of despair mixed with the delusive hope that she might still be alive. A similar fate befalls Timon of Athens, who finds when he has lost his wealth that he has no friends and goes off to live alone in the woods. Digging in the earth for roots to eat, he finds gold, the last thing he desires, and once again becomes, to his virtually fatal disgust, an immensely wealthy man. And in The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes, after sixteen years, recovers the wife and daughter whom his paranoid jealousy had seemed to destroy.