The practice of combining love and justice in the governance of relationships between parents and children is crucial to the moral formation of the young. This balancing act also requires the most strenuous and careful exercise by those who would be good parents of the very moral virtues that they are striving to cultivate in their offspring. Moreover, the entire endeavor hangs on one of the oldest and most perplexing of all questions, the question …showed first 75 words of 7910 total…

…showed last 75 words of 7910 total…its "principal structural weakness." The five characters who were "technically of the first importance" included Lear, his three daughters, and Edmund. Edgar was "technically about as important as Laertes." I would argue that once the focus shifts from the Lear/Gloucester axis to where it properly belongs, to the Lear/Edgar axis, the sense of both the structure and the meaning of the play changes dramatically. The quotations here are from Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1952), 254-56, 262.