occasions, streamlined by fragmentation of sense and motive 
for exact calculation. They are like Lear, avant-garde 
Machiavels, able to deal explicitly and scientifically with 
occasions. They are resolute and consciously liberated not only 
from the square of sense but from its moral analogate, 
“conscience.” For that ratio among motives “does make 
cowards of us all.” And Cordelia is a coward hindered from 
specialist action by the complexities of her conscience, her 
reason, and her role.

King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by  
which men translated themselves from a world of roles to a 
world of jobs.

*     King Lear  is a kind of elaborate case history of people 
translating themselves out of a world of roles into the new