King Lear

1. King Lear Third lecture

2. 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.7.48-49): “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.

3. 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. 10-11. • 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.”

4. 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?

5. 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.4.85-100). • 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.”

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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?