John Carpenter: Shakespeare's Cliff.

This chalk cliff near Dover has been identified as a match for the justly famous description by Edgar in King Lear of an imagined cliff seemingly realised so effectively because it is based on personal experience of an actual topographical feature, as was very characteristic of Wordsworth's nature poetry:

Come on, sir; here's the place:--stand still.--How fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire--dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish'd to her cock; her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge
That on the unnumber'd idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high.--I'll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong. (IV.vi.11-24)

This view recurs as stage scenery in a sketch of the ending of Lear, in this site's Gallery 15.1.40. The connection is reinforced by a recognizable precedent describing an identical locale as spoken by Richard of Gloucester in Henry VI, Part 3:

Why, then I do but dream on sovereignty,
Like one that stands upon a promontory,
And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,
And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,
Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way.
So do I wish the crown, being so far off. (III.ii. 134-40)

Since France is visible from this cliff-top it seems likely that Shakespeare has attributed the same personal experience to two dissimilar characters, making it more likely to derive from an intense personal experience of his own, reflected in the fullness of the particularities and emotional involvement with which each passage has been developed. That this has been universally agreed is reflected in the general acceptance of the topographical feature's name. It is certain that Wordsworth knew of this indication of Shakespeare's attentiveness to landscape, as he notes it on his way to France. Shakespeare devoted many plays to French history and lived for several years with the Huguenot family of the Mountjoys, so his concern at failing to achieve an actual visit to France is understandable. The intensity of feeling about landscape in both these passages anticipates a similar intensity in such Wordsworth poems as Tintern Abbey and The Prelude. The image is a detail from a picture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.