The reconciliation scene, I have suggested, shows in Lear more than a recognition of the facts, a recovery of ‘sight’ from his earlier ‘blindness’. Although it is often put in some such way, the point of the scene is not so much what Lear now comes to see, as what he can now acknowledge – less, that is, a matter of facts which were there all along and which he at last perceives, than of his being able at last to accept certain things, even if tacitly, as facts. Whether or not he also accepts them as good or bad is not the immediate question; the crucial thing here is that he accepts them as real. Only in so far as he does that – and it is only painfully and still only partially that he can – does he release their force, their significance, in himself and in Cordelia, and thus into the world as they apprehend it, and through that, into the world both of them evoke and embody to us.

To take one obvious example, they do not merely ‘recognize’ or ‘see’ the bond between them as though they had not seen it before. They were both very much aware of it earlier; but each of them, constraining his self, could acknowledge the bond he saw only as a constraint. Now, each of them, being able to face the vulnerability of his ‘heart,’ not only enables himself and the other to love freely, but at the same time is able to acknowledge the fact that the other does so.