'King Lear' scene by scene 5
TRANSCRIPT
Act II scene iii
In the great baggy narrative that is King Lear, one of the more surprising elements is the story of Edgar, the strait-laced and dismally gullible legitimate son of the one of the most senior nobles in the kingdom, deciding to turn himself into the lowest of the low, a Bedlam beggar:
The basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury in contempt of man
Brought near to the beast.
There are of course several more stages in Edgar’s extraordinary transformation into the man who becomes King at the end.
As in so much of this play, we cannot expect realism. Of course, even covered in rags and filth Edgar would have been spotted. But this transformation deepens Shakespeare’s exploration of change, of ‘nothing’ and of social structure. I recommend Ian Mortimer’s book The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabeth England, which is brilliant at conveying the daily texture of life in Shakespeare’s times. In 1570 one-quarter of the population of Norwich was judged to be poor: some were disabled, some ‘lunatic’, some in extreme old age’. There was no social welfare. Mortimer writes:
The poor are an unavoidable feature of Elizabethan life. In 1577 William Harrison estimated that there were 10,000 vagrants on the roads, not including the resident poor in towns and villages. In 1582 William Lambarde remarks on the increasing number of vagabonds in Kent; and in 1593 he laments that the county is ‘overspread not only with unpunished swarms of idle rogues and of counterfeit soldiers but also with numbers of poor and weak but unpitied servitors’.
This is the life the privileged Edgar has chosen, since he is ‘nothing’ as Edgar, that word which haunts the play from its first use by Cordelia in her explosive answer to her father’s question about love. It is Poor Tom who in Act 3 will prompt Lear’s most profound insights into life when he recognises that the lunatic beggar is ‘the thing itself, unaccommodated man… a poor bare forked animal’, the essence of humanity without any superfluity. Then Lear tears off his own clothes as an act of solidarity and identity, a visible manifestation of the way he is being stripped of all that he had assumed: he too seems to be on his way to being nothing.
Act II scene iv
Lear is beginning to realise the truth of his situation. He splutters that Cornwall and Regan will not speak with him, a blatant act of disrespect to the King, but there is also recognition of his new weakness: he suggests that perhaps Cornwall is not well. In the last powerful section of this scene, his distress, his ‘rising heart’, mounts. Regan is scarcely civil to him, drawing attention to his age, and telling him off:
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of her confine: you should be ruled and led
By some discretion that discerns your state
Better than you yourself. Therefore, I pray you,
That to our sister you do make return:
Say you have wronged her.
In his pain he fires off fusillades of futile insults about Goneril, and in feeble desperation says that Regan would never treat him that badly. Her dismissive response:
Good sir, to the purpose.
There follows one of the most significant passages of the play, culminating in the first of Lear’s most profound insights. After Kent has been released from the stocks, Regan starts it all off with a demand that her father dismisses half his soldiers when returning to Goneril - a double humiliation. He rejects her forever (the second daughter in a short time), calling her
a disease that’s in my flesh /
Which I must needs mine: thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood.
(another one of the several plague references in this play written during times of plague). He says he will take his 100 knights to Regan: she says no, 25 will do, and so he abases himself by reverting to Goneril:
I’ll go with thee:
Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty.
And thou art twice her love.
Goneril asks him
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
And then the killer question from Regan, who is always the last person to twist the knife:
What need one?
In the arithmetic of course what would be left would be zero, or nothing. Regan’s word ‘need’ prompts a speech by Lear that is among the most moving, insightful and significant of the play. Typically, it is just after the evident nonsense that ‘thou art twice her love’. In Edgar’s later words, we see ‘Matter and impertinency mixed.’
The first half of the speech is the most significant, as he responds to Regan’s ‘What need one?’ with
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady:
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need-
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both.
This is Lear’s first true insight into lives other than his own, especially those at the bottom of society, people he has never even noticed before. True need is that which elevates us above beasts. He says that the ‘basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous’, a word which he uses again in its noun-form in Act III scene iv, when he says, about the homeless and destitute,
O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp:
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just
That radical vision acknowledges that those who have little deserve some of the ‘superflux’ that a King was always accustomed to, that even the basest beggar has something ‘superfluous’ to mere existence.
Towards the end of the speech Lear breaks down, weeping while denying that he is, and all too aware of his incipient madness:
This heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!
And as soon as he leaves, his daughters discuss him with brutal coldness, with Goneril saying all this is his own fault:
‘’Tis his own blame; hath put himself from rest
And must needs taste his folly.
Regan backs this up later as she talks to Gloucester:
O sir, to wilful men
The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmasters.
As I said in the last episode the last word of Act 2 is ‘storm’, and it is this literal and metaphorical storm which now takes over the central part of the play.