Excerpt from Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear: With Introduction, and Notes Explanatory and Critical, for Use in Schools and Classes Sun took place in October, 1605, and had been looked for ward to with dread as portending evil the more so, because an eclipse of the Moon occurred within the space of a month previous. And John Harvey had, in 1588, published a book wherein, with the wisdom of nature, he had reasoned against the common belief, that such natural events were ominous of disaster, or had any moral significance whatever. To all which, add that in November, 1605, the dreadful secret of the Gunpowder Plot came to light, so that one at all superstitiously inclined might well say that nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects, and that machina tions, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves putting all this together, we have ample ground for inferring the play to have been writ ten when those events were fresh in the public mind. This of course brings down the date of composition at least to near the close of the year 1605. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.