It is infrequently realized that, after Lear himself, the crucial personality in the drama is Edgar, legitimate son of Gloucester, and godson of Lear. Lear speaks 749 lines, Edgar 392, which is more than anyone else. Surprisingly Kent speaks 368, while Gloucester speaks 338, and I think we neglect Kent’s role. Edmund at 307 lines is the counterpoise to Edgar, and I will argue that, for all his malevolent triumph, he is less of a challenge to our imagination than is Edgar.
I am startled that the Fool has only 227 lines, since they are so memorable. It might be expected that the descending order after that would be Goneril at 199, Regan at 190, and the perplexed Albany at 159. Poor Cordelia, absent in her exile and then martyred in her return, speaks only 117 lines, just 8 more than the bestial Cornwall. At 78 lines, the wretched Oswald completes the principal speaking roles.
Both quartos (1608, 1619) of King Lear give prominence to Edgar on their title pages:
True Chronicle Historie of the life and
death of King LEAR and his three
Daughters.
With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne
and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his
sullen and assumed humor of
TOM of Bedlam
“Sullen” might derive from the Anglo-French solain, and so would be related to the Latin solus (“alone”). In Canto VII of the Inferno, Dante shows those who were sullen in the sweet air, and now must speak through mud up to their mouth. This was once called acedia, “the malady of monks.”
Edgar’s “humor” stems from the ancient belief that each of us contained four fluids—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—and that the balance between the fluids determined our temperament and health. By the later 1500s, humor simply meant temperament. Edgar’s personality, traumatized by Edmund’s betrayal, indeed becomes both sullen and assumed.
Edmund’s subtle weaving traps both Gloucester and Edgar. Though benign, Gloucester has little intelligence, while Edgar begins as a trusting youth. Shakespeare grants Edmund astonishing deftness at writing with the lives of his father and brother, even as Iago weaves his net with Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona.
Gloucester: Kent banished thus? and France in choler parted?
And the King gone tonight? Prescribed his power,
Confined to exhibition? All this done
Upon the gad?—Edmund, how now, what news?
Edmund: [Pockets the letter.] So please your lordship, none.
Gloucester: Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?
Edmund: I know no news, my lord.
Gloucester: What paper were you reading?
Edmund: Nothing, my lord.
Gloucester: No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see.—Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
act 1, scene 2, lines 23–36
“Nothing” brings us back to Lear and the Fool, and the tolling bell of “nothing” resonates throughout the drama.
Edmund: I beseech you, sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my brother that I have not all o’er-read; and for so much as I have perused, I find it not fit for your o’er-looking.
Gloucester: Give me the letter, sir.
Edmund: I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame.
Gloucester: Let’s see, let’s see.
Edmund: I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an essay, or taste of my virtue.
Gloucester: [Reads.] ‘This policy, and reverence of age, makes the world bitter to the best of our times, keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways not as it hath power, but as it is suffered. Come to me, that of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I waked him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever and live the beloved of your brother. Edgar.’ Hum! Conspiracy! ‘Sleep till I wake him, you should enjoy half his revenue.’—My son Edgar, had he a hand to write this? A heart and brain to breed it in? When came this to you? Who brought it?
Edmund: It was not brought me, my lord, there’s the cunning of it. I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.
Gloucester: You know the character to be your brother’s?
Edmund: If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would fain think it were not.
Gloucester: It is his?
Edmund: It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents.
Gloucester: Has he never before sounded you in this business?
Edmund: Never, my lord. But I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son and the son manage his revenue.
Gloucester: O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter. Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain—worse than brutish! Go, sirrah, seek him. I’ll apprehend him. Abominable villain! Where is he?
act 1, scene 2, lines 37–78
One wonders that Gloucester is so quick to believe Edmund. Generational strife pervades King Lear. Even so, something in Gloucester seems undone by the King’s self-destructive quasi-abdication. He sends Edmund to bring back Edgar, and Shakespeare juxtaposes Gloucester’s confused musings with Edmund’s cold delight in response:
Gloucester: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished, his offence honesty! ’Tis strange, strange!
Exit.
Edmund: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. 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.
act 1, scene 2, lines 103–33
Gloucester speaks for the audience’s concern in 1605 about succession, two years after the death of Elizabeth and the advent of James I. “Nature” is heard three times, inexorably followed by “it shall lose thee nothing.” “We have seen the best of our time” portends this most tragic of tragedies. Overcome by strangeness, Gloucester commences his movement from figurative to literal blindness.
Edmund brims with negative exuberance in his mordant soliloquy, after his father’s departure. Dismissing all stupidity, including astrological nonsense, he affirms his disposition with alacrity, and returns to his status as bastard. With Edgar’s entrance, Edmund again contrives his own comedy, casting his brother as victim:
Edmund: Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam.—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.
Edgar: How now, brother Edmund, what serious contemplation are you in?
Edmund: I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses.
Edgar: Do you busy yourself with that?
Edmund: I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily, as of unnaturalness between the child and the parent, death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities, divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against King and nobles, needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches and I know not what.
Edgar: How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
Edmund: Come, come, when saw you my father last?
Edgar: Why, the night gone by.
Edmund: Spake you with him?
Edgar: Ay, two hours together.
Edmund: Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him, by word nor countenance?
Edgar: None at all.
Edmund: Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him, and at my entreaty forbear his presence till some little time hath qualified the heat of his displeasure; which at this instant so rageth in him, that with the mischief of your person it would scarcely allay.
Edgar: Some villain hath done me wrong.
Edmund: That’s my fear. I pray you, have a continent forbearance till the speed of his rage goes slower; and, as I say, retire with me to my lodging, from whence I will fitly bring you to hear my lord speak. Pray ye, go: there’s my key. If you do stir abroad, go armed.
Edgar: Armed, brother!
Edmund: Brother, I advise you to the best, go armed. I am no honest man if there be any good meaning towards you. I have told you what I have seen and heard—but faintly; nothing like the image and horror of it. Pray you, away!
Edgar: Shall I hear from you anon?
Edmund: I do serve you in this business.
act 1, scene 2, lines 134–76
We are grimly charmed by Edmund’s theatricalism. He makes Edgar into the catastrophe or culmination of an antique comedy, while taking his own cue as the assumed melancholy of the villain. Uncannily he prophesies what he cannot know, Edgar’s assumption of the disguise of Tom o’ Bedlam. Mocking Gloucester’s language, he sings out a “Fa, sol, la, mi,” a discordant variation on the fourth, fifth, sixth, and third notes of the C major scale.
A different tonality is invoked, as Edmund surpasses his father in previewing the consequences of unnaturalness. The difference is that Edmund himself will be the chief cause of overturn in the family, the kingdom, and at last in the world:
Edmund: 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. I see the business.
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;
All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.
act 1, scene 2, lines 177–82
As always, Edmund is precise and accurate. Gloucester and Edgar are by nature incapable of apprehending evil. What Edmund calls wit is Machiavellian cunning. He cannot know, however, that he has created a new Edgar, who will forge a painful identity as an inexorable avenger.
In transition, Edgar is given a crucial soliloquy:
I heard myself proclaimed,
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place
That guard and most unusual vigilance
Does not attend my taking. While I may scape
I will preserve myself, and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury in contempt of man
Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod, poor Tom!
That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.
act 2, scene 2, lines 172–92
Now an outlaw, Edgar begins to draw upon his hidden resources. Needing a disguise, he descends to the absolute bottom of the social scale. He becomes Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, a homeless vagrant and beggar no longer confined to the madhouse of Bethlehem Hospital. In a manuscript commonplace book of 1620 or so, there is an astonishing poem marked by Shakespeare’s influence. To me it has always seemed the greatest anonymous poem in the English language, a “Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song” worthy of the poet of King Lear:
From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
The spirit that stands by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye,
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken
Nor wander from yourselves, with Tom,
Abroad to beg your bacon.
While I do sing, “Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink, or clothing?”
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing . . .
When I short have shorn my sow’s-face
And swigged my horny barrel,
At an oaken inn I impound my skin
In a suit of gilt apparel.
The Moon’s my constant mistress
And the lovely owl my marrow,
The flaming drake and the night-crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
While I do sing “Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?”
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
There are several versions of this lyric, but this is the strongest. A visionary intensity of Shakespearean eloquence breaks through the rough rhetoric to the uncanny Romanticism of:
The Moon’s my constant mistress
And the lovely owl my marrow,
The flaming drake and the night-crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
From this midpoint the poem mounts higher:
The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen,
Your culvers take, or matchless make
Your Chanticlere or Solan!
When I want provant, with Humphrey
I sup, and when benighted
I repose in Paul’s with waking souls
Yet never am affrighted.
But I do sing “Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?”
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars
In the wounded welkin weeping,
The moon embrace her shepherd
And the Queen of Love her warrior,
While the first doth horn the Star of Morn
And the next, the Heavenly Farrier.
While I do sing “Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?”
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
This is premonitory of Shelley in its exaltation of poetic imagination over classical wisdom. The high lyricism goes on to an Ariel-like delicacy:
The gypsies, Snap and Pedro
Are none of Tom’s comradoes;
The punk I scorn and the cut-purse sworn,
And the roaring-boy’s bravadoes.
The meek, the white, the gentle
Me handle, touch and spare not,
But those that cross Tom Rhinosceros
Do what the Panther dare not.
Although I do sing “Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?”
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
I hear a Shakespearean touch again in:
The meek, the white, the gentle
Me handle, touch and spare not,
But those that cross Tom Rhinosceros
Do what the Panther dare not.
Wonderful as the poem is to this point, its final stanza is a triumph of imaginative vision:
With an host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to Tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end—
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet I do sing “Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?”
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.
Why bring this Mad Song to the apprehension of Edgar? “Poor Tom! / That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.” Edgar has chosen to be the naked thing itself, the human reduced by abnegation to negate “I am.” Nothing has come to nothing yet Edgar will prove to be as strong as he is subtle. There is an element of self-punishment in his disguise. He could have chosen Kent’s path and reappeared as Lear’s servant. Shakespeare wants the wheel to come full circle. Edgar will rise from humiliation to a suffering hero, and his metamorphosis will be one of Shakespeare’s most powerful and enigmatic inventions.