The storm is over. In the new day Edgar moves on, a fugitive between disguises, though his array remains Poor Tom’s:
Yet better thus, and known to be contemned,
Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best,
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace;
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts.
Enter Gloucester, led by an Old Man.
But who comes here?
My father, parti-eyed? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age.
act 4, scene 1, lines 1–13
It is unclear at what point Edgar realizes his father has been blinded. Yet his mind, like Hamlet’s, is quicksilver. Emending “parti-eyed” to “poorly led” is unpersuasive. Edgar, increasingly toughened by his vicissitudes, nevertheless is cast into shock at this sight of Gloucester. I pause here to reconsider some of the enigmas and perplexities evoked by Edgar.
No other major personality in all of Shakespeare has been interpreted as feebly and indeed maliciously as the exemplary Edgar. One critic termed this heroic survivor “a weak and murderous character.” More balanced scholars tend to find him unsympathetic and even perverse. As always, my late friend William Elton is the saving exception. He sees Edgar truly as a stubborn triumph of persistence, a pilgrim of filial devotion questing for his ruined father.
Stand back from the vast drama of King Lear. Edgar begins as a credulous youth, unaware of evil, and an easy victim for Edmund. Like Kent, he becomes an internal exile, but chooses to go even lower in the social scale than Kent does. As Tom o’ Bedlam, Edgar takes the way down and out to the very bottom of societal existence. He startles us with his genius for acting and for enduring.
Edgar mutates from Poor Tom to a disgraced serving man, then to a West Country peasant, then a messenger, and finally to a masked knight in black armor, nameless and fatal, against whom even the formidable Edmund has no chance. In all of Shakespeare, there is nothing like these astonishing metamorphoses.
Edgar the actor, who moves so subtly from disguise to nemesis, has to bear a high cost of transformation. Nothing is got for nothing. Edgar loses his father, his godfather, and his trust in the gods. He gains a kingdom, which he does not want, and is left alone to sustain it when Albany abdicates and Kent prepares to abandon life, somehow to go on serving Lear.