Excerpt from Macbeth, King Lear Contemporary History: Being a Study of the Relations of the Play of Macbeth to the Personal History of James I, the Darnley Murder and the St. Bartholomew Massacre and Also of King Lear as Symbolic Mythology I wish, as before, to thank my historical colleagues at Aberystwyth - Mr Sydney Herbert, Dr E. A. Lewis and Professor Stanley Roberts - for the invaluable assistance they have given me in recommending books and sources and in discussing this work during its progress. I wish especially to thank Professor Stanley Roberts for a particularly generous encouragement, of the more value because of his own wide knowledge of Elizabethan history. I also desire to express my gratitude to Mr Hubert Hall of the Record Office for his very kind assistance during my work there. To readers who are interested in these studies of Shakespeare so far as they have gone I should like to say that the evidence will be cumulative, each study confirming its predecessors. Thus, in searching for contemporary parallels to King Lear I had the good fortune to find a book, Pierre Mathieu's Deplorable Death of Henry IV, with its accompanying Panegyric and Poem, which I take to contain a far-reaching explanation of the allegory of The Tempest; extracts from this book are given in Chapter xiv of the present work and in Appendix B. I intend to make it the subject for my next study and I should like to say that it will give the strongest corroborative evidence for the treatment of King Lear as symbolic mythology. 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.