King Lear Third lecture

The Gloucester subplot The division between the generations clearly parallel to the Lear plot. Like Cordelia, Edgar, the good son, is driven out. Like Lear with his daughters, Gloucester is blind to Edmund’s treachery. And Gloucester’s blindness parallel’s Lear’s madness. The scene literalizes Gloucester’s metaphor of the violence done to Lear (III ): “Because I would not see thy cruel nails pluck out his poor old eyes.” The blinding of Gloucester a scene of unmitigated, nightmarish horror: “out vile jelly!” Gloucester is “enlightened” at the precise moment he is blinded: “Then Edgar was abused.” Just as Lear’s madness comes of his understanding of Goneril and Regan’s cruelty to him.

Gloucester and Edgar Edgar’s optimism at IV.1 – “Yet better thus...” is shattered when his father comes in. And he himself alludes to the temptation of suicide? Ll Gloucester’s “I stumbled when I saw.” And his yearning “to see [Edgar] in my touch.” And his near recognition of Edgar in “Poor Tom.” His inability to “see” Edgar? His despair: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/ They kill us for their sport.” Why does Edgar not reveal himself to Gloucester at this point? But instead lead him to Dover and the feigned miracle. “’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.”

Edgar’s “miracle” It seems to come in place of Edgar’s “recognition” of Gloucester. And it plays with the audience’s perceptions: what characters say on stage are the sets and settings on Shakespeare’s stage. So what Edgar and Gloucester say at the beginning of IV.6 must confuse us: are we laboring up the hill to Dover cliff or not? And has Edgar thrown off his “Poor Tom” act? How staged? Edgar’s own doubts: might his “miracle” have killed his father through the imagination of suicide? His explanation literalizes Gloucester’s despair in terms that come of a morality play: “the fiend.” Edgar’s lesson: “Bear free and patient thoughts.” But why didn’t Edgar simply declare himself to Gloucester?

Lear’s journey Just as Lear’s “prayer” recognizes the “Poor naked wretches” (III.4), such a naked wretch enters in Edgar’s guise of “Poor Tom.” Almost as if Lear’s altered state of mind causes what he imagines to materialize! Lear’s growing madness mirrored in the feigned madness of Poor Tom. Edgar plays the role of repentant Mankind, such as one might see in a morality play. Which includes temptations to suicide, as well as to others of the “seven deadly sins” (III ). Lear embraces him as “unaccommodated man,” “the thing itself” – humanity in its most basic state.... and attempts to imitate, identify with Poor Tom: “Off, off, you lendings!” And another “pat” entrance: the fool speaks of “a little fire in a cold field were like an old lecher’s heart – a small spark, all the rest on’s body cold.” And who should come it but the the old lecher himself, Gloucester! Whom Edgar calls “the foul fiend Flibbertigibbit.” A nightmare world: see Gloucester’s lines: “Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile/ That it doth hate what gets [i.e., begets] it.” “Tom” becomes Lear’s “philosopher.”

Fourth stage of Lear’s journey: Lear completely mad encountering the blind Gloucester IV.6: Lear on the heath, “mad, bedecked with weeds” stripped of all his identity – he too is now “unaccommodated man”? –... encounters the blinded Gloucester. Lear’s “pardoning” of Gloucester’s adultery – and his mad misogyny. Gloucester: “O let me kiss that hand.” Lear: “Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.” He “mistakes” Gloucester’s bandage for Cupid’s blindfold – somehow connecting his sin with its punishment. Seeing the world “feelingly”: the world’s hypocrisy. Lear’s mad insights into authority: “a dog’s obeyed in office.” And the hypocrisy of justice: tattered clothes vs. furred gowns. How much of Lear’s discourse is madness, how much a new clarity? Edgar exclaims, “O matter and impertinency mixed! Reason in madness.” His “lesson” to Gloucester: “Thou must be patient.” And the newborn infant’s tragic understanding of life.

The meeting with Cordelia There was a climactic scene in the old morality plays when the penitent protagonist was given a “garment of repentance” by the saving Virtue character. IV.7: Lear brought in, freshly clothed, asleep in chair. Cordelia slowly wakens him with music, kisses him. Lear’s “true” delusion: “Thou art a soul in bliss...” And in kneeling plays the part in old the morality play. And slowly recovers a sense of himself. But only in a relational sense to Cordelia? “as I am a man, I think this lady/ To be my child Cordelia.” His guilt? “No cause. No cause.” And then in V.3 he imagines a contented life in prison with Cordelia. But the ordeal is not yet finished.

Back to Lear and Gloucester plots Edgar’s “miracle” scene analogous to Cordelia’s meeting with her father. But things remain more abstract? Despair to be cured abstractly, by the staged “miracle”? Reiterated at V.2: 9-11: “Ripeness is all.” But still he doesn’t reveal himself. After the battle, Edgar and Edmund “exchange charity.” And Edgar holds to a sense of absolute justice: “The dark and vicious place where thee he got/ Cost him his eyes.” But seems to admit his own fault in concealing himself from his father: ll 193ff. The circumstances suggest a dark and rigid justice playing itself out: Edmund and Gloucester both die. And Edgar, the just son, survives. But how does this compare to the Lear story?