Chapter 7

Edmund, Goneril, and Regan

Edmund in King Lear appears in the first scene of the play in an exchange between his father and the Earl of Kent, in which his bastardy is jokingly presented. Gloucester says:

Though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for,

yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson

must be acknowledged. (20–23)

I think it is important that Edmund’s bastardy is insisted on so early in the play. There is a popular belief that bastards are free spirits who are not bound by the social restrictions of legitimate sons.

We feel that the basis for Edmund in King Lear is already evident in Philip Faulconbridge, the bastard son of Cordelion, King Richard I, John Faulconbridge’s older brother in King John. The Bastard is a heroic protagonist of that play, who speaks in the swaggering language of political opportunists. He is called Bastard in the speech prefixes, and he insists on his bastardy as a proof of his “mounting spirit” (1.1.206):

Who dares not stir by day must walk by night,

And have is have, however men do catch.

Near or far off, well won is still well shot,

And I am I, howe’er I was begot. (172–75)

The Bastard’s bravado in King John is recalled and expanded in Edmund’s long soliloquy in Act I, scene ii of King Lear. He is Gloucester’s “natural” son—a synonym for bastard—so that it comes as no surprise when he begins by invoking Nature as his goddess and questions the low status of illegitimate sons:

Why bastard? Wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous and my shape as true

As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us

With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth within a dull stale tired bed

Go to the creating of a whole tribe of fops

Got ‘tween a sleep and wake. (6–15)

Edmund is echoing his father’s speech in the previous scene, and he dwells lovingly on the words “base,” “baseness,” and “bastardy.”

Edmund also has strong filiations with Iago in Othello in his histrionic skill, in his wit, and in his use of many soliloquies in the early scenes to emphasize his close reliance on the good will of the audience.1 Some of Edmund’s phrasing seems to come right out of Othello. For example, his “auricular assurance” (92) echoes Othello’s “ocular proof” (3.3.357). But more important than verbal echoes is the fact that Edmund’s villainy seems to be modeled on Iago’s. In his second soliloquy in Act I, scene ii, Edmund scoffs at Gloucester’s idea about astrological influences on human actions. To Edmund everything that happens depends on our will:

An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on

the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s

tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and

lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the

firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (126–33)

This is what Edmund calls “the excellent foppery of the world” (118); it is remarkably similar to what Iago tells Roderigo:

Virtue? A fig! ’Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Our bodies are our

gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or

sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme . . . why, the power and corrigible

authority of this lies in our wills. (Othello 1.3.314–17, 320–21)

Edmund’s plot against his brother, Edgar, is ruthless, clever, and ingenious. Like Iago, he pretends to be his brother’s friend, and, with feigned reluctance he shows his father the invented letter of Edgar. Like the dramatist who is writing King Lear, Edmund is a skillful plotter. He speaks in the language of the theater to announce his brother’s entrance:

Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam. (1.2.134–36)

Notice that Edmund predicts the disguised role his brother takes to escape pursuit.

In his third and final soliloquy in this scene, Edmund, again like Iago and other Shakespearean villains, gloats over how easy it is to trick both his father and his brother:

A credulous father and a brother noble,

Whose nature is so far from doing harms

That he suspects none—on whose foolish honesty

My practices ride easy. (177–80)

Here is again that villain’s word “practices,” meaning stratagems or tricks, and we remember how Iago delights in his reputation for honesty. This is also the case in Antony’s oration in Julius Caesar: “Brutus is an honorable man,/ So are they all, all honorable men” (3.2.84–85). Edgar’s “foolish honesty” matches Gloucester’s credulousness in making them easy victims of Edmund’s plots. His soliloquy ends with a ringing couplet:

Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;

All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit. (181–82)

Bastards depend on wit and self-fashioning, not on their birth.

Edmund’s clever plot is continued with renewed vigor and a reliance on theatrical tricks in Act II, scene i. Edmund is so naturalistic in his acting that he goes so far as to cut himself, as if he were stabbed by Edgar:

Some blood drawn on me would beget opinion

Of my more fierce endeavour. I have seen drunkards

Do more than this in sport. (34–36)

But Edmund can learn, even from drunkards, how to give the appearance of valor. What’s interesting about this scene is how fully Edmund imagines the drama, including imaginary dialogue spoken by his brother. He takes pleasure in hearing his father call Edgar a “strange and fastened villain” (77), “fastened” meaning confirmed or inveterate. Edmund obviously delights in his little playlet. And when Regan asks whether Edgar wasn’t “companion with the riotous knights/ That tended upon my father?” (94–95), Edmund is pleased to agree: “Yes, madam, he was of that consort” (97). It is all part of his fertile and self-interested fantasy.

It comes as no surprise that Cornwall should conceive an immediate liking for Edmund:

Whose virtue and obedience doth this instant

So much commend itself, you shall be ours.

Natures of such deep trust we shall much need;

You we first seize on. (114–17)

Villains seem to have an instantaneous attraction for each other. In a brief soliloquy at the end of Act III, scene iii, Edmund has no scruples about betraying his father, who has received a letter, presumably from Cordelia, who is invading England with her husband, the King of France.

Cornwall will also be informed about Gloucester’s help to Lear:

This seems a fair deserving and must draw me

That which my father loses, no less than all.

The younger rises when the old doth fall. (22–24)

Ironically, Edmund is acting out the conspiratorial letter he imagines for Edgar in Act II, scene i. He develops this letter further to make Edgar seem to be in league with the invaders of England, “an intelligent party to the advantages of France” (3.5.11–12). Edmund is suddenly made Earl of Gloucester by Cornwall, and he persists in his duplicity, as if there were a real conflict between his loyalty to Cornwall and his blood ties to his father. Cornwall is very satisfied by this proceeding. He proposes that Edmund “shalt find a dear father in my love” (3.5.24–25).

Cornwall is curiously imperceptive when he dismisses Edmund from the intensely cruel scene of the blinding of Gloucester (III,vii): “the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father are not fit for your beholding” (7–9). When both his eyes have been put out, the benighted Gloucester still calls upon his son Edmund to “enkindle all the sparks of nature/ To quit [requite] this horrid act” (85–86). Regan delights in conveying to him the shocking news:

Out, treacherous villain,

Thou call’st on him that hates thee. It was he

That made the overture of thy treasons to us,

Who is too good to pity thee. (86–89)

Gloucester is now the villain, and he has a sudden recognition of the truth:

O my follies! Then Edgar was abused?

Kind Gods, forgive me that and prosper him. (90–91)

The proper conclusion of this scene is in Act IV, scene v, where Regan comments on the dangers of Gloucester’s continued existence:

It was great ignorance, Gloucester’s eyes being out,

To let him live. Where he arrives he moves

All hearts against us. Edmund, I think, is gone

In pity of his misery to dispatch

His nighted life. . . . (11–15)

In Regan’s twisted morality, Edmund is going to kill his father “In pity of his misery,” as if it were an act of kindness. This is the first glimpse we have of Edmund the killer, although he seemed indifferent earlier to his accused brother’s fate. He later sends his Captain to murder King Lear and Cordelia in prison—what the Captain calls “man’s work” (5.3.40).

In Act IV, scene ii, we already see Edmund in an entirely different role as the love object of Goneril, who is very sexual in her wooing:

Ere long you are like to hear—

If you dare venture in your own behalf—

A mistress’s command. (19–21)

She then gives him a love token, possibly a chain, and switches to the informal second-person “thy” and “thee:”

Wear this. Spare speech,

Decline your head. This kiss, if it durst speak,

Would stretch thy spirits into the air.

Conceive, and fare thee well. . . . (21–24)

The courtly and well-spoken Edmund says only before he exits: “Yours in the ranks of death” (25).

When Edgar kills Oswald in Act IV, scene vi, he opens a letter Oswald was carrying from Goneril to Edmund importuning him to kill her husband, the Duke of Albany:

Let our reciprocal vows be remembered. You have many opportunities to cut him off. If your will want not, time and place will be fruitfully offered. (257–60)

She addresses Edmund as if he were a hired assassin to “deliver” her “from the loathed warmth” of the marriage bed, “and supply the place for your labour. Your (wife, so I would say)” (262–64). We saw nothing in the play about the “reciprocal vows” between Edmund and Goneril—only Goneril’s lustful and homicidal passion.

There is a similar amorous interplay between Edmund and Regan in Act V, scene i. Regan, too, is overtly sexual. She asks Edmund if he loves her sister; he is cagey in his answer: “In honoured love” (9). But Regan presses on with her questions: “But have you never found my brother’s way/ To the forfended [forbidden] place?” (10–11). She suspects Edmund of adultery, but he is careful not to answer her questions directly: “That thought abuses you” (11) and “Fear me not—” (16).

Edmund’s long soliloquy at the end of this scene makes it clear that he intends to marry neither sister:

To both these sisters have I sworn my love,

Each jealous of the other as the stung

Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?

Both? One? Or neither? Neither can be enjoyed

If both remain alive. To take the widow

Exasperates, makes mad her sister Goneril,

And hardly shall I carry out my side,

Her husband being alive. (56–63)

This is cold and cynical, like Richard, Duke of Gloucester’s, contemptuous wooing of Anne: “I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long” (Richard III 1.2.229). Edmund’s soliloquies vividly imitate the thought processes of speech. He doesn’t want to conceal anything from the audience, which is meant to share in his speculations. At the end of this soliloquy we also learn that he rejects Albany’s “mercy” for Lear and Cordelia, whom he plans to murder in prison: “for my state/ Stands on me to defend, not to debate” (69–70).

When Edgar defeats Edmund in single combat in Act V, scene iii, there is a definite softening in Edmund’s cruel and hard-hearted villainy. To Albany he acknowledges his guilt:

What you have charged me with, that have I done,

And more, much more; the time will bring it out.

’Tis past and so am I. (160–62)

Edgar desires to “exchange charity” (164) with his brother, as Hamlet does with Laertes, and he asserts the rightness of all that has happened:

The gods are just and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us:

The dark and vicious place where thee he [Gloucester] got

Cost him his eyes. (168–71)

Even though this moral formulation seems too neatly balanced, Edmund agrees: “Thou’st spoken right, ’tis true;/The wheel is come full circle, I am here” (171–72). And further: “This speech of yours hath moved me,/And shall perchance do good” (198–99).

The mollification of Edmund continues when he sees the dead bodies of Goneril and Regan:2

Yet Edmund was beloved:

The one the other poisoned for my sake,

And after slew herself. (238–40)

This is an uncomfortable moment for Edmund. The violent deaths of Goneril and Regan, neither of whom he intended to marry, is only a proof to him that he “was beloved.” It must seem strange to him that anyone could love him at all, since he himself is so much a self-centered creature of will, with no room for anyone else. It is as if both of these women sacrificed themselves for him. Part of Edmund’s wonder must be that love exists at all, even in its most pernicious form. This is the first time in the play that he is aware of love as a potent human emotion, and he resembles Iago at this point.

In keeping with Edmund’s change of heart, he suddenly remembers the writ he has issued for the secret deaths of Lear and Cordelia in prison: “I pant for life. Some good I mean to do,/Despite of mine own nature” (241–42). The Captain

hath commission from thy wife [Goneril] and me

To hang Cordelia in the prison and

To lay the blame upon her own despair,

That she fordid herself. (250–53)

At the end of the play Edmund finally recognizes his own evil nature. He tries for some form of reconciliation, but it is too late, and Lear enters right after with the hanged Cordelia in his arms.

Following the Cinderella story, Goneril and Regan are the evil older sisters of Cordelia—King Lear is strongly shaped by its folktale origins. They are not obvious villains like Edmund, yet their action in the play in relation to Lear and Gloucester is extraordinarily cruel and villainous. When Regan and her sister shut their doors on Lear and leave him out on the heath in the midst of a furious storm (II, ii), they are clearly indifferent as to whether their old father will manage to survive. We have already spoken of their adulterous love for Edmund, which is never reciprocated. From the first act of the play they are already in league against their old father. Their love speeches are formulaic and rhetorical, like King Claudius’s opening oration in Hamlet. They speak what King Lear expects to hear from them. Their conversation at the end of this first scene prepares us for the evil that is to follow. They act in concert from the very beginning of the play, as Goneril tells us: “let us hit together” (304–5), or agree jointly. Their insight into their geriatric father is acute. Goneril notes:

You see how full of changes his age is. The observation we have made of

it hath not been little. He always loved our sister most, and with what poor

judgement he hath now cast her off appears too grossly. (290–93)

Regan then generalizes on what becomes the basis for Lear’s tragedy: “’Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (294–95). So the sisters have a plan, which looks as if it were a conspiracy, about how to deal with their almost senile father.

By Act I, scene iii, their stratagem is already at work. Goneril directs her steward, Oswald, to “come slack of former services” (10) and “Put on what weary negligence you please” (12). She infantilizes her father (as the Fool will shortly emphasize):

Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities

That he hath given away. Now by my life

Old fools are babes again and must be used

With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused. (18–21)

“Idle” means both indolent and foolish. I think it is important to remember that Goneril and Regan plot against their father from the beginning of the play. As audience, we are not, I think, meant to affirm that what the daughters say is based on observation of Lear and his hundred knights, as these early scenes are often played. Goneril and Regan are emphatically not reasonable, rational creatures responding to a bad domestic situation, as if this were a naturalistic play by Ibsen.

The point is further developed in Act I, scene iv by Goneril’s insistent attack on Lear, his Fool, and his knights:

Not only, sir, this your all-licensed fool,

But other of your insolent retinue

Do hourly carp and quarrel, breaking forth

In rank and not to be endured riots. (191–94)

I think what is involved here is whether Goneril is reporting what we in the audience actually see or whether it is all part of her and her sister’s plot against their father.

Goneril initiates her plan by boldly criticizing Lear and his companions:

As you are old and reverend, should be wise.

Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires,

Men so disordered, so debauched and bold,

That this our court, infected with their manners,

Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust

Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel

Than a graced palace. (231–37)

Goneril is already quite openly threatening her father:

Be then desired,

By her that else will take the thing she begs,

A little to disquantity your train,

And the remainders that shall still depend

To be such men as may besort your age,

Which know themselves, and you. (238–243)

We await anxiously for what will happen, but we know already that the abdicated King is now without any means to stand up to his elder daughters.

In Act II, scene ii, Cornwall, the husband of Regan, joins the attack on Lear. The fact that his messenger, Kent, is put in the stocks is a further insult to the old King. Cornwall is contemptuous: “This is a fellow of the selfsame colour/ Our sister [sister-in-law Goneril] speaks of” (135–36)—an additional proof that all three are plotting together. This scene anticipates the blinding of Gloucester in Act III, scene vii because we have a strikingly cruel remark of Regan. When Cornwall decrees that Kent shall sit in the stocks “till noon” (131), Regan goes him one better: “Till noon? Till night, my lord, and all night too” (132).

We hear Regan in this scene echoing her sister in their attempt to bargain away Lear’s status:

What, fifty followers?

Is it not well? What should you need of more?

Yea, or so many, sith that both charge and danger

Speak ‘gainst so great a number? (426–29)

Goneril backs up her sister:

Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance

From those that she calls servants or from mine? (432–33)

Regan continues to chip away at the initial stipulations:

Why not, my lord? If then they chanced to slack ye

We could control them. If you will come to me—

For now I spy a danger—I entreat you

To bring but five and twenty: to no more

Will I give place or notice. (434–38)

Lear’s eloquent “reason not the need” (453) speech is lost on his grasping daughters and Cornwall.

By Act III, scene vi the mad Lear is arraigning his daughters, and this scene serves as a prelude to the blinding of Gloucester in the next scene. First, Goneril, who “kicked the poor King her father” (47–48), then Regan:

let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any

cause in nature that make these hard hearts? (73–74)

Lear is despairing at this point because there is nothing he can do to defend himself.

The scene then shifts to Gloucester, who is captured in III, vii. Regan plays a particularly savage role in this unimaginably cruel scene. When Cornwall orders that Gloucester be bound, Regan goes him one better and says: “Hard, hard. O, filthy traitor!” (32). What has Gloucester ever done to Regan to deserve such treatment? Then Regan plucks his white beard, an insulting act often depicted in martyrdoms. The pinioned Gloucester can only protest:

Naughty lady,

These hairs which thou dost ravish from my chin

Will quicken [come alive] and accuse thee. I am your host. . . . (37–39)

“Naughty” means wicked, a much stronger word in Shakespeare’s time than in ours. Earlier, Lear had said to Regan:

Thy sister’s naught. O, Regan, she hath tied

Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here [pointing to his heart]. (2.2.323–24)

In III,vii the blinding of Gloucester, each eye done separately, emerges as an improvised punishment suggested by his own response to Regan about why he has accompanied the lunatic King to Dover:

Because I would not see thy cruel nails

Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister

In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs. (55–57)

This statement immediately prompts Cornwall to say:

See’t shalt thou never. Fellows, hold the chair;

Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot. (66–67)

We know from Regan’s rejoinder that Cornwall has only stamped out one eye: “One side will mock another—th’other too” (70). The physical cruelty of this scene is amplified by the fact that Gloucester’s two eyes are separately extinguished.

When Regan stabs to death the servant who has mortally wounded her husband, the servant’s dying lines are spoken to Gloucester:

O, I am slain. My lord, you have one eye left

To see some mischief on him. (80–81)

Cornwall immediately seizes the occasion to pluck out Gloucester’s remaining eye: “Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly,/ Where is thy lustre now?” (82–83). Then Regan directs a servant to thrust Gloucester “out at gates and let him smell/ His way to Dover” (92–93). The horror of the scene comes from its insistence on intolerable physical details.

We have already discussed the way Goneril and Regan openly woo Edmund. It is all very sexual, as Goneril says contemptuously to Edmund:

O, the difference of man and man!

To thee a woman’s services are due;

A fool usurps my bed. (4.2.26–28)

Kent calls Goneril and Regan “dog-hearted daughters” (4.3.46), which continues the persistently negative connotations for dogs in Shakespeare. At the end of the play, the daughters vie with each other for possession of Edmund, who is singularly indifferent to both. Goneril poisons Regan, and Regan kills herself with a knife. Edmund confesses that he “was contracted to them” (5.3.227), but he expresses no personal sorrow at their deaths. He is only flattered, in an almost incredulous way, that he “was beloved” (238). Albany sees the tragic events as a “judgement of the heavens that makes us tremble” (230), but he insists that it “Touches us not with pity” (231). The deaths of the evil daughters seem like a providential element in the play, but very soon we see the dead Cordelia in Lear’s arms. The mystery of the tragedy in King Lear may be better formulated in Cordelia’s words at the beginning of this scene: “We are not the first/ Who with best meaning have incurred the worst” (3–4).

Edmund is a cunning villain, like Iago and Richard, Duke of Gloucester. It is emphasized that he is a bastard, like Faulconbridge in King John, and therefore a free and natural spirit, a creature of strong will, who is also an atheist. He scoffs at his father’s astrological belief in the influence of the stars. He seems to be tickled by the idea that he is beloved by both Goneril and Regan, who kill themselves for his sake, but he himself is incapable of loving either of them or anyone else. Without much scruple, he betrays his father to Cornwall and is ambitious to rise in fortune. Goneril and Regan are not exactly villains, but they plot against their aging father from the beginning of the play. They are determined to reduce his status, especially in regard to his hundred knights, but when they leave him out on the heath during a furious storm, they don’t care whether he lives or dies. Cornwall, the husband of Regan, participates in one of the cruelest scenes in Shakespeare—the blinding of Gloucester—and Regan thinks later in the play that they would have been better off had they killed Gloucester.

Notes

1. See Robert Bechtold Heilman’s detailed and comprehensive study, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1948.

2. See Christina León Alfar, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakesperean Tragedy, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003, especially Chapter 3, ”Looking for Goneril and Regan.”