ACT II
In many ways this is a transitional act. Edmund completes his trickery, achieves his father’s gratitude and brother’s sentence of death, and sends out the first real feelers to the Cornwall\Regan party. But he still remains in the background of the wider, political scheme of things. Edgar has escaped and disguised himself as Tom O’ Bedlam (scene iii), but at this point is far from connected to an emerging “story line"; his isolation is almost at its peak. Lear has been constantly on the move, and in the “big” scene, his confrontation with Regan (and hence the final break with all his children), he leaves to go out into the gathering storm. The reader\audience knows that the worst is yet to come, but also that the worst is starting immediately. The trick in staging (and the strategy for getting the audience to enjoy) this act, therefore, is to generate sub-textually (through the visual images, sound, movement and gestures of the actors) the sense and feel of flight, escape or hunt, and then in scene iv, to evoke the sense of bringing the family conflict to a head, while yet leaving room for greater catastrophes.

The first two scenes take place at night, and the general ambiance and also the appearance of Gloucester’s men with torches should convey the impression (from Edgar’s point of view) of people being awakened abruptly in the night, not quite awake, and then sent off in confusion. Cornwall and Regan, on the other hand, have been riding hard through the night, are again brought out into the night when Kent and Oswald start fighting, and are then awakened early in the morning at Lear’s arrival. Kent’s natural tendencies to impatience and boldness are undoubtedly sharpened by his having travelled all night. The whole scene with Oswald is given an eerie feel with the moonlight. And even scenes iii and iv are cut through with a dawn-like vulnerability. Imagine a theatrical setting where the action is framed by the image of armed soldiers. The whole atmosphere is one in which everyone needs protection -- brooding, ominous.

In scene iii Edgar disguises himself and brings his appearance “near to beast.” The literal paradox, of course, is that he is being hunted like a beast, and it is only by looking like one that he might be able to escape. But Shakespeare is also raising for the first time the whole theme of human beings stripping themselves down to the naked “thing itself.” Raise the question of the profound way in which people dress themselves to be some particular kind of person; social status and place is reflected in dress. Is it any different today? In what way? Notice that when Edgar places himself in with the lunatics and beggars, filling the countryside with calls for charity, he points to a lacking in Lear’s government: there is a huge gulf between those who have and those who have not. In his film version of Lear, what Kozintsev calls the “geography of poverty” provides a whole visual setting, and students might see a kind of resonance in the ubiquity of our contemporary “homeless,” with their “lunatic” curses or passive “prayers” for help. Ask how this could be played on the stage.