'King Lear' scene by scene 2
The second episode of the King Lear scene by scene podcast, in which I go through the great tragedy hoping to illuminate it in some way for teachers and pupils. This time, Act 1 scene 2, introducing the sub-plot starting with the memorable Edmund.
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Transcript: Act 1 scene 2
Act I scene 2 introduces us to one of the most distinctive features of King Lear, the sub-plot that will twine its way in and out of the main one throughout the story. This is the only occasion on which Shakespeare used the device in his tragedies. In his essential book 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, James Shapiro comments that the sub-plot was introduced by Shakespeare, since the source story, King Leir,
lacked a counterpoint, a way to highlight Lear's figurative blindness by juxtaposing it with something more literal.
Shapiro calls the result
A double helix, firmly interlocked and mutually illuminating.
which is a good way to think of the close relationship between the two plots throughout the story.
Act I scene i opened with two characters in a state of uncertainty: the second scene opens with one character expressing thrilling certainty. And what a character he is, too: after the exasperating foolishness of so many characters in the first scene, here is clarity and honesty (to himself, at least):
Thou, nature, art my goddess: to thy law
My services are bound.
So, not to anyone else’s law.
Edmund’s soliloquy is full of thrilling energy - questions, exclamations, repetitions, particularly with the alliterated plosive sound ‘b’:
Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? bastardy? Base, base?
In the latter part of the speech he plays with the word ‘legitimate’, rich sarcasm driving his five repetitions of the word:
Fine word, ‘legitimate’
And he memorably finishes:
Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards.
Edmund knows exactly who he is, in a play that so often questions just what we are: is Lear what a King should be (and indeed he comes to question his own identity)? Are Goneril and Regan truly daughters?
Then Edmund’s father Gloucester enters, and Edmund embarks on an embarrassingly easy duping of him. Gloucester comes in flustered from witnessing the disaster of Scene i, and a kingdom now in chaos, and asks his illegitimate son ‘What news’.
The answer is ‘So please your lordship, none’ as he (deliberately badly) pretends to hide the (forged) letter from Edgar. When his father questions this action, Edmund denies it: he does not even have to act well, since Gloucester is primed for gullibility. When he asks his son ‘What paper were you reading?’ Edmund replies ‘Nothing, my lord’ to which the father states:
The quality of nothing hath not need to hide itself. Let’s see: come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
And here we see two of the persistent tropes of the play: the idea of ‘nothing’, and the idea of sight or blindness. Gloucester fails to see that there is indeed ‘nothing’ in that letter. Later, tragically, he comes to insight and says ‘I stumbled when I saw’. His current blindness is clear in his summary of what he thinks has been happening, in the speech starting
These late eclipses in the sun and the moon portend no good to us.
He refers to the way nature has been disordered, there is ‘discord’ everywhere and ‘ruinous disorders’: that is true, but what he cannot see is why this is so. It is certainly not due to the recent eclipses. As soon as he has gone off, huffing and puffing about the state of the world, Edmund shows how clearly he sees truth. He retorts sarcastically:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behaviour,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by 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 to the charge of a star!
This is central to what King Lear as a play does. It forces us to look clearly at the origins of human behaviour, and just who and what we are. As Edmund says, we tend to try to ‘evade’ the truth. He knows it: he knows he is bad, and there is something refreshingly honest about that, especially given the foolishness we have previously seen. Edmund has often been compared to a central figure of the slightly earlier tragedy Othello, the ensign Iago, perhaps the greatest villain in dramatic history. Like Iago, Edmund is fascinating, a bad boy who draws us to him, especially in comparison with his watery brother Edgar. Edmund doesn’t actually have the chilling psychopathic depth that Iago does, and in the end seems a rather two-dimensional character as he plays two women off against each other, but for the moment he certainly grabs our attention.
When Edgar enters he is indeed gullible and unimpressive, his father’s son, unable to deal with Edmund’s rather crude and obvious manipulation, and Edmund’s final words summarises them both well. He says all this with relish:
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.