In this manner lengthy conversations go on calling forth in the
spectator or reader that wearisome uneasiness which one experiences when
listening to jokes which are not witty.

This conversation was interrupted by the approach of Goneril. She
demands of her father that he should diminish his retinue; that he
should be satisfied with fifty courtiers instead of a hundred. At this
suggestion, Lear gets into a strange and unnatural rage, and asks:

"Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:
Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied. Ha! 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?"

And so forth.

While this goes on the fool does not cease to interpolate his humorless
jokes. Goneril's husband then enters and wishes to appease Lear, but
Lear curses Goneril, invoking for her either sterility or the birth of
such an infant-monster as would return laughter and contempt for her
motherly cares, and would thus show her all the horror and pain caused
by a child's ingratitude.

These words which express a genuine feeling, might have been touching
had they stood alone. But they are lost among long and high-flown
speeches, which Lear keeps incessantly uttering quite inappropriately.
He either invokes "blasts and fogs" upon the head of his daughter, or
desires his curse to "pierce every sense about her," or else appealing
to his own eyes, says that should they weep, he will pluck them out and
"cast them with the waters that they lose to temper clay." And so on.

After this, Lear sends Kent, whom he still fails to recognize, to his
other daughter, and notwithstanding the despair he has just manifested,
he talks with the fool, and elicits his jokes. The jokes continue to be
mirthless and besides creating an unpleasant feeling, similar to shame,
the usual effect of unsuccessful witticisms, they are also so drawn out
as to be positively dull. Thus the fool asks the King whether he can
tell why one's nose stands in the middle of one's face? Lear says he can
not.--

"Why, to keep one's eyes of either side 's nose, that what a
man can not smell out, he may spy out."

"Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?"

"No."

"Nor I either; but I can tell why a snail has a house."

"Why?"

"Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his
daughters and leave his horns without a case."