William shakespeare's king lear

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1880/07/king-lear/632291/

SHAKESPEARE was forty-one years old when he wrote King Lear. Just at the time of life when a well-constituted, healthy man has attained the maturity of his faculties, he produced the work in which we see his mind in all its might and majesty. He had then been an actor some fourteen or fifteen years, and of his greater plays he had written Romeo and Juliet, Richard III., The Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV., Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Measure for Measure. In the case of a man who mingled himself so little with his work, who was, in other words, so objective a poet, it is not safe to infer the condition of his mind from the tone of his writings. But it is worthy of remark that King Lear quickly followed Measure for Measure, and came next to it as an original play, and was itself followed next by Timon of Athens, and that in these three plays the mirror that is held up to human nature tells more revolting and alarming truths than are revealed in all his other plays together. Not in all the rest is the sum of the counts of his indictment of the great criminal so great, so grave, so black, so damning. Hardly is there to be gathered from all the others so many personages who are so bad in all the ways of badness as the majority of those are which figure in these three.