1. Jonathan Peel JLS 2014
Lear 6: Doubles
Saturday, 24 November 2018

2. Which characters double up?
Contrasts
Echoes
Mirror images
Given the two plots, it makes sense that there should be characters which double up.
Some critical responses follow
You need to find evidence from the text to support the assertions.
Which characters double up?
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

3. From R. A. Foakes’ Introduction to the Arden King Lear (1997)
Unlike Edmund, Edgar has no particular character at the beginning, and he gains in stature as he takes on a series of disguises, reappearing in his own person at the final scene of the play. It is too simplistic to idealise him merely as a moral parallel to Cordelia, representing good…It also diminishes Edgar simply to return him into a kin d of everyman, experiencing what it means to become, in his various disguises, poor Tom, a messenger, a peasant, a knight, and ending in his final role of ruler, sharing the realm. Some have argued that a Jacobean audience would have been aware of the historical Edgar, King of England , whose reign was regarded as something of a golden age for his establishment of codes of law, founding of monasteries and concern for religion, which led to his being made a saint
From R. A. Foakes’ Introduction to the Arden King Lear (1997)
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

4. …Poor Tom had an immediate appeal for the audience at the Globe as linking a play based on ancient history directly with the notorious underworld of the Jacobean period…when he turns into Poor Tom and shares the stage with Kent in the stocks, the two figures, both of them outcasts and humiliated, are seen as the victims of Lear’s rage and Edmund scheming.
In Nahum Tate’s version of the play, which continued to be a success until well into the nineteenth century, Cordelia survives to be married to Edgar
On Edgar and …
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

5. Edgar has an obvious symbolic function as the ‘unaccommodated man’ who brings Lear and Gloucester to a new moral consciousness and as a force of good overcoming evil in battle
In Act 3, the Fool drifts apart from Lear, who only notices him with momentary concern and affection…he becomes increasingly obsessed with what his daughters have done and fixated on Edgar as Poor Tom.
Foolish Edgar
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

6. The Fool ‘humanises’ Lear and has ‘intellectual superiority in seeing what the consequences of dividing the kingdom will be…[he] brings out the aspect of folly in what King Lear has done’…
Fool
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

7. The rebellion of both [ Lear’s and Gloucester’s children] has been seen as marking a transition from an old order to a new, or as exposing contradictions within the absolute monarchy maintained by Lear, but dramatically the immediate conflict is between the old who are set in their ways and have become spiritually blind, and the young who either reject the dishonesty this blindness breeds (Cordelia) or take advantage of this situation for personal gain (Edmund, Goneril and Regan).
A generation gap
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

8. [in act 4] Gloucester is a victim of physical cruelty whereas Lear is victim of psychological cruelty.
Two old men
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014

9. TASK Find evidence for each of these statements
Write a short paragraph in which you zoom in to word level to show how this might be applied.
TASK
Jonathan Peel JLS 2014