King Lear I.ii.118-133

The old comedy

[GLOUCESTER:              ''Tis strange, strange.   Exit]

EDMUND   This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on 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 on the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the
firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—

Enter Edgar

and pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam.—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.

Gloucester exits, sounding a little like Horatio-turned-Polonius. (Horatio: “O day and night but this is wondrous strange.”) Now we are finally to meet Edgar, who’s been talked about since the beginning of scene i. But first we get a self-delighting prose soliloquy from Edmund, whose astrological skepticism sounds like Hotspur’s wonderful takedown of astrology in 1 Henry IV.¹ Edmund’s dislike of foppery is refreshing — see the “whole tribe of fops” he scorns in the scene’s opening soliloquy, made fops by the actual circumstances of their conception (“got ‘tween asleep and wake”), just as he has been made the charismatic villain that he is by being conceived in the lusty stealth of nature.

But Gloucester, once the energetic and enthusiastic adulterer, has now become a fearful older man. (He seems to be about Kent’s age, which seems to be about forty-eight: older than Shakespeare…). His lust was a feature of his youth, when he was a person who could have conceived Edmund. His present anxiety, expressed in the astrological excuses Edmund parodies, underlines a personality trait of the current Gloucester’s: a timid failure to take charge in difficult situations he’s at least partly contributed to. He’s brazed to acknowledging Edmund, but that took a while, and now he lets Edmund control things, since (as his being a sectary astrological shows) he himself can’t. And more important still: Edmund’s general scorn for astrological explanations of lechery and adultery reminds us of Gloucester’s own actual responsibility for having committed adultery — it wasn’t heavenly compulsion or a forced obedience of planetary influence. This will matter at the end of the play.

Edgar’s entry, like the catastrophe — climax — of the old comedy, adds to Edmund’s glee. Like many of Shakespeare’s self- and audience-delighting villains (cf. Frank Underwood in House of Cards), he knows that the audience knows that this is a play. Compare Iago’s jibe at Shakespeare himself: “And what’s he, then, that says I play the villain?” (II.iii.356) The answer is: Shakespeare says he does, since Iago (as Lionel Trilling long ago pointed out), is the only character described simply as a “villain” in the dramatis personae to be found in the First Folio.

Another touch here — an example of Shakespeare’s priming the audience — is Edmund’s mention of Tom o’ Bedlam. We’ll be that much more prepared for Edgar’s disguise now that we’ve been reminded of the stock character. And having Edmund play Tom — for a moment — links him with Edgar all the more strongly (again like the first syllables of their names).

(The notes that Edmund sings have been much debated: I think for an audience they would just sound like somewhat discordant music, though Shakespeare may have meant more by them. But I, of all people, do not want to overread.)

GLENDOWER                       At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets, and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the Earth
Shaked like a coward.

HOTSPUR                    Why, so it would have done
At the same season if your mother’s cat
Had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.  (III.i.13-20)

1. I am not even mentioning the use of shake in this interchange, here and in the lines that follow.