Meta-Drama in King Lear

Without doubt King Lear is the great masterpiece not just of Shakespearian drama or of Elizabethan drama in general, but of world drama. To it the dramatist has succeeded in imparting at once the happiest of happy endings in Act IV and the saddest of sad endings in Act V, as it were inverting (from a deeply Christian viewpoint) the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ, with its climax in the statuary of the Pieta when the sorrowing father holds the dead body of his innocent daughter, to the accompaniment of Albany's exclamation, "O see, see!"