ACT IV

2) Why do you think Gloucester is so intent on committing suicide? What do you consider the “usual” reasons for this act? And do you think Gloucester’s reasoning is conventional?

3)  Why do you think Gloucester is the first person Lear “recognizes” (in scene vi)? Compare the later recognition of Cordelia in scene vii.

It was only in the 19th century that the original Lear started to be performed on stage again. For a long period of time, the heavily cut (no fool, no real Lear madness, etc.) and adapted (Cordelia and Edgar had a love interest, Lear lived happily ever after, etc.) version by Nahum Tate was performed. Even though this sanitized, romanticized version is universally despised these days, many critics still see the characters in black and white, good or bad terms, and Edgar is one of the “good” characters. Considering that he ends up as king at the play’s end, there is probably a kind of vested interest in seeing him this way (a residual Tate-ism : a wish for the “best” ending given Lear’s death?) Nevertheless, one wonders just what textual evidence there is regarding Edgar’s character.

Until his exile, Edgar has very few lines (unlike Edmund) and those say very little about his character. (Edmund refers to his “foolish honesty” in I, ii, and Regan suggests he is one of Lear’s “riotous knights” in the same scene, but we have to cut through all sorts of biases and hidden intentions to make sense of these —— contradictory? -- comments.) Scene iii, Act II is all Edgar. He is in a panic, which is natural, but there is also a strange extremeness to his talk. In other words, it is a good ruse to disguise himself with the beggars, but he takes a kind of high- pitched delight in the self-mutilating habits of those folk. In Act III, too, he needs to act the mad-man to keep up his disguise and protect himself, but at times there is more than a little Hamlet at play : pretending to be mad so well that the audience senses that he might not be merely pretending. (Notice that he appears when Lear seems ready to get the sleep he so desparately needs, and hence does the king a grave disservice ..unintentionally though that might be.)

All of this is speculative, however, but in Act III Edgar makes things much clearer, yet also, paradoxically, much more complicated. Because nothing could be clearer than that his father neither hates him anymore, nor could do anything to him if he did, and that Edgar keeps up the disguise ... which now becomes deception. Look, for instance, at the horrible irony at the beginning of vi when he responds to his father’s accurate statement regarding his changed mode of speech : “Y’are much deceived.” The deception is certainly not like Edmund’s. In the opening scene he says to himself “I cannot daub it any further ... and yet I must.” So he is clearly torn between revelation and continued disguise. But what is the force of “must”? Is the necessity that of irrational compulsion? Is Edgar a kind of masochist? (The imagery of II, iii might indicate pure disguise.) After all, he says (just before the previous comment) that his policy or “trade to play the fool” angers “itself and others” (my emphasis).

In scene vi Edgar says that although he seems to be “trifling with [Gloucester’s] despair,” his intention is to “cure” it. Is there any evidence of this curative effect? Or any reason why such actions might have one? Perhaps Edgar and his father are subject to the same sort of self-pitying incapacity to confront reality? Even though conventional wisdom is that Gloucester is blinded then he “sees,” there is little to suggest that he achieves real insight. Recognizing the fact that he was deceived by one son and hence did an injustice to the other, is not true recognition. (Is it?) Doesn’t the rich sense of recognition entail coming to grips with who one is oneself, and then acknowledging the other people bound up with the lying, protective layers on which self-identity was hitherto built?

Gloucester doesn’t come close to this kind of self—knowledge; rather he straightaway goes to commit suicide. Is that a cure? (I’m not saying it’s not.) Might Edgar’s grotesque complicity in Gloucester’s attempt to commit suicide be indicative of his incapacity to move toward self-knowledge? At the end of scene vii, even though Edgar has just “saved” his father from Oswald (saved him from what? himself? from future grief at the hand of Edgar?), Edgar becomes so engrossed in his own renewed plans to “top the illegitimate,” so to speak, that his father becomes a strange rag-doll to be dragged around ... merely because it can’t be ditched?

Notice that Lear himself never (does he?) sees suicide as a way out of his problems. Perhaps that is because he falls into madness, wherein crazy “imaginations,” as Gloucester put it, save him from contemplating and being racked by his grief. Shakespeare never seems to work with the old convention that madness has a kind of insight (does he?), and Gloucester’s comment contains the more plausible idea that madness merely protects Lear from himself. Perhaps Lear is just harder and more resilient than Gloucester, and that provides for the possibility of recovery. In scene vi, for instance, Lear dances madly around the identity of Gloucester (and hence his own identity and predicament) until he uses the latter’s literal blindness as a means to acknowledging both self and other. (He does so with someone who cannot see him... .) Without this tentative step (and sleep of course) perhaps Lear would not be ready to acknowledge Cordelia in the following scene. (Several pages by Stanley Cavell in “Selected Criticism” illuminate all the foregoing questions.)

Some have argued that one reason why the “mad trial” scene in Act III, vi was omitted in the later Folio version of King Lear, was that the audience laughed. In some sense, of course, the sight of people gone mad is certainly not funny; and the play could scarcely work if it turned into a black comedy (about senility). Yet when we switch to IV, vi, it is hard not to at least smile at Lear, especially when he is making jokes. They are hard to take because they are bitterly cruel. Pick out and study the various jokes about Gloucester’s lack of eyes, realizing that Lear is probably poking and touching them at the same time he is talking. Are these kind of mad, cruel jokes different in kind than “ordinary” jokes, or do they merely focus Henri Bergson’s claim that within all jokes there lies a suppressed desire to humiliate, and to place someone beneath oneself?

G. Wilson Knight has used the term “grotesque humor” to characterize the kind found in this play. Jan Kott took this further and argued that humor of the “absurd” suffused Lear. In other words, the world view of Samuel Beckett (and, in general, post-war existentialist philosophy) was the only one, Kott argued, that could capture the sort of theatricality in the Gloucester’s “suicide” scene. Because it could only be successfully played on a bare stage and heavily mimed as if by two clowns inhabiting a world without significance : Edgar and Gloucester represented insignificance in their action. Are there any other scenes in the play that do this? By this time Fool has gone completely from the play. Does this mean that the other characters start enacting the sort of “meaningful absurdity” that Fool used to utter in his words? Or does that start to distort the meaning of the two scenes in Act IV which seem most in line with this kind of interpretation.

A more conventional kind of humor appears in Goneril, and it is interesting how it works to differentiate her from the rather grim Regan. After Edmund leaves at the beginning of scene ii, Goneril sighs “0, the difference of man and man!” and no doubt the audience smiles in acknowledgement. And even when she and Albany are face to face later in the scene, if she utters “Marry, your manhood, mew ... " in an imitative way, the feline sarcasm is delicious. Her hysterical tendency builds in Act V, but it, too, is shot through with black wit when Albany (with his little joke) reveals his knowledge of Goneril’s conspiracy against him. Her response to Regan’s “Sick, O sick” is best of all “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.”

More than making Goneril less one-dimensional, it also ties into the often unintentionally humorous side of Lear’s character. And the contrast is with Edgar’s character which never seems to escape a moralistic, self-pitying gloom. Notice that in his “mad” scenes, Edgar always seems to dwell on sexual guilt. Is that coincidental? Lear, moreover, loses his humor immediately in vi when he returns to his hatred for sex as the procreative source of life. Is there some sort of strange connection?