King Lear III.iii.1-24
Strange things toward
III.iii Enter Gloucester and Edmund. GLOUCESTER Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not this unnatural dealing. When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house; charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him. EDMUND Most savage and unnatural. GLOUCESTER Go to, say you nothing. There is division between the dukes, and a worse matter than that. I have received a letter this night: ’tis dangerous to be spoken; I have locked the letter in my closet. These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home. There is part of a power already footed. We must incline to the King. I will look him and privily relieve him. Go you and maintain talk with the Duke, that my charity be not of him perceived. If he ask for me, I am ill and gone to bed. If I die for it, as no less is threatened me, the King my old master must be relieved. There is strange things toward, Edmund. Pray you, be careful. Exit EDMUND This courtesy forbid thee shall the Duke Instantly know, and of that letter too. This seems a fair deserving and must draw me That which my father loses, no less than all. The younger rises when the old doth fall. Exit
Happy birthday to Shakespeare (traditional). Though it’s somewhat unlikely that Shakespeare was born April 23 (see Lena Cowen Orlin’s great examination of the records on this), even if he were that’s April 23 old style (on the Julian calendar), before the Gregorian correction which would make May 3 the day exactly 461 full years after April 23, 1564.
Anyhow. Gloucester and Kent are both trying to aid Lear in the storm. Edmund is inside, Edgar (as we’ll soon se) is outside, and when Gloucester leaves Edmund here he will see Edgar again, though without consciously realizing that this is who Poor Tom is. (His son will come into his mind, as he says later, but the deep association won’t be the same thing as conscious recognition.) Gloucester and Kent are further linked in that both have news of the coming invasion, the “part of a power already footed.” Part of a power indeed, since France himself won’t be there, which is what will make Cordelia’s defeat seem plausible.1 And Shakespeare’s audience certainly doesn’t want France to invade successfully — hence Gloucester calls the threat an even worse matter than the mistreatment of Lear. And still another battle is toward: between Albany and those who would kill Lear at the end.
We know, then, that the play is moving towards what we will soon be thinking of as Dover. Though that vector hasn’t been established yet, it’s certainly in the works. The letter that Gloucester has locked in his closet Edmund will give to Cornwall, who shows it to Goneril in IV.vii, summarizing its contents, telling her to “Show [Albany] this letter. The army of France is landed” (IV.vii.2-3; this is an off-stage echo of the earlier scene with Gloucester, when he shows him the letter he’s forged; we don’t need to see another version of that scene, which has been enough to establish how people can find out plots or conspiracies, whether true or false.)
Gloucester reports how powerless he now is, in his own house! and how he will nevertheless attempt to aid the King. He echoes Goneril in an interesting way: she instructs Oswald to tell Lear that she is sick and gone to bed too (“When he returns from hunting, / I will not speak with him. Say I am sick” [I.iii.8-9]).
Gloucester calls what he is doing charity. Edmund, on the rise, has contempt for this charity, which as a machiavellian manipulator of the courtly game he calls courtesy instead, a kind of court behavior. But charity is the accurate word — a word that appears four times in the play. The other three uses are by Edgar — twice when seeking charity as poor Tom, and one last time again, when Edgar offers to “exchange charity” with the dying Edmund. It’s not as major a word as unnatural or nothing — words that appear here too. (Now it is Edmund who is supposed to “say… nothing”.) But the idea of some reduced, bare charity is starting to give the play the tonality it will have from here on.
In the meantime Edmund sees himself rising at his father’s expense, just as he’d pictured it at the start. The wheel of fortune is carrying him upwards to a point where he anticipates inheriting everything and starts seeing his way clear to still higher achievement, perhaps even King of England; meanwhile Gloucester and Edgar are on their way down.
Serious invasions are rarely repulsed in Shakespeare’s plays, because the return to the status quo ante is usually not a powerful story. In Othello the storm has to scatter the Turkish fleet, so their invasion is not an issue. (This is Shakespeare’s version of the Armada story.). But Fortinbras’s prominence at the start of Hamlet means that he’ll be king of Denmark at the end. Even 1 Henry IV isn’t really an exception; it’s still a play in which a person who is underestimated takes power in the end.