King Lear

What about Edgar? He’s quite an actor, performing in different voices, isn’t he? He’s Poor Tom, but then after that, after the cliff fall, he’s the man on the beach and after that he’s the peasant with the accent who kills Oswald—why does Edgar have all these different languages and voices and play all these different roles? Why doesn’t he much sooner just say, “Look, Dad, I’m sorry. You should be sorry, you got the wrong son, I’m the good one. You’re blind, this is me …” So many opportunities in so many different roles … until he finally gets around to telling his father the truth, by which time he’s left it so late that all Gloucester can do is die of a heart attack.

Noble: I think he takes upon himself the sins of others, in particular the sins of the father, in order to redeem himself. It’s a profoundly religious, spiritual journey that Edgar goes on and a very tough regime that he imposes upon himself. The disguises, flagellation, and infliction of misery are all part of that. Through the course of the play he cleanses himself. He’s like a character out of a George Herbert poem.

Nunn: Edgar does say, at a crucial moment of the play, at the moment where he could cease to be the Tom o’Bedlam character at last, “I cannot daub it further,” and then in the very next instant, “And yet I must.” In this production we’ve tried to identify something specific about that change of mind. There are men on Gloucester’s orders scouring the country on the hunt to capture and kill Edgar if they find him. We have a troop of those soldiers passing at that point, so Edgar’s “yet I must” is clearly justified as self-preservation, and by association the preserving of his father.

But there’s a deeper explanation that Edgar himself also provides when he takes Gloucester, who is suicidally bent, to an imaginary cliff edge. Just before the death plunge moment, Edgar has an aside to the audience, “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it.” This is fundamental in Edgar’s journey. He observes that his father is now only full of resentment and hatred for the world, of believing that there was never anything worth believing in. Edgar, still clinging to his belief in divine justice, cannot allow his misguided, misled father to die a bad death or an unredeemed death. Therefore he makes it his mission to bring his father beyond suicidal thoughts to a different, reconciled set of attitudes. The gods seem to be unwilling to back up that reconciliation and continue to rain down horror, but Edgar’s changes of identity are entirely to bring his father to a better spiritual place.

There’s something of a fairytale quality to the play, isn’t there? Goneril and Regan as the ugly sisters, Cordelia as a Cinderella with an unhappy ending. But, especially since Peter Brook’s famous production and film, there’s also an approach to the play that emphasizes Lear’s unreasonable rage, the chaos caused by his riotous knights, and the sense that his daughters, Goneril especially, aren’t villains through and through.