King Lear is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And
yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom
Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king--Edgar--has
often seemed little more than a blank, ignored and unloved, a belated
moralizer who, try as he may, can never truly speak to the play's
savaged heart. He saves his blinded father from suicide, but even this
act of care is shadowed by suspicions of evasiveness and bad faith.
In Poor Tom, Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received
understandings--and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He
argues that the part of Edgar is Shakespeare's most radical experiment
in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and
theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends
most of the play disguised, much of it as "Poor Tom of Bedlam," and his
disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one
person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives
life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses--undead,
or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the
Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in
King Lear, close attention to this particular part can shine stunning
new light on how the whole play works.
The ultimate message of Palfrey's bravura analysis is the same for
readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the play:
see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as
though there is nothing there.
