edgar

• We might have a number of reasons to feel discomforted at Edgar’s character. In the opening scenes of the play, before his transformation to Poor Tom, he comes across as insipid and uninspiring.
• Edmund makes the comparison between his illicit sexual dynamism and his pedestrian brother when he compares how they were conceived - Edmund of ‘lusty stealth of nature’ and Edgar in a ‘dull stale tired old bed’.
• Such a conception of Edgar is compounded by the gullible attitude he displays towards his brother (’Some villain hath done me wrong’) believing his lies about Gloucester, despite the fact that he has just seen him for the first time in nine years.
• It is therefore fitting that Edmund calls his brother ‘catastrophe of the old comedy’ - an unwitting stooge in Edmund’s web of theatrical artifice. Edgar appears easily manipulated and unthinking, especially in comparison to his brother. 
• ne of the supposed comforts Edgar offers to the audience is in the way he quantifies and moralises upon the expansive action of the play, offering us understanding and guidance to something that might otherwise be vast and explicable.
• This, however, is flawed. In 4.1, when Edgar tells us that ‘the lamentable change is from the best, the worst returns to laughter’, Here, Edgar is trying to find comfort in his lowly position as poor tom (‘Edgar I nothing am). 
• Such a point of view though is immediately undercut by the arrival of his blinded father, proving that one always has further to fall and that finding comfort in one’s lowly position is misguided. 
• Furthermore, at the end of the play, Edgar attempts to provide us with the summative moral that we should ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’. Such an idea however is not supported by much of the action of the play as characters - Cordelia, Lear, kent, for example - who spoke exactly what they felt, suffered as a consequence of it, whilst the deceptive Edmund, triumphed.

  Therefore, the comfort Edgar seeks to offer the audience only succeeds in disturbing us further as any attempt to moralise or quantify the action on stage comes across as flawed.
• We also cannot escape the disturbing way Edgar treats his father
• Moreover, the scholar, Stanley Cavell, argues that nothing can justify the cruel trick he plays on his father and insists, that in hiding his true identity, it is as though Edgar has ‘blinded him a second time’
• After all, Gloucester voices his hope that to ‘touch’ Edgar would allow him to ‘see him in his touch’ and this’ would be enough to say he ‘had eyes again’
• Through dramatic irony, the audience is also implicated in this trick and this renders the humiliation Gloucester endures when he falls on his face all the more unsavoury. Indeed, the hoodwinking of the suicidal Gloucester by Edgar might be considered one of the most uncomfortable moments of the play.
• Furthermore, after he stabs Edmund, he tells his father ’The Gods are just, the dark and vicious place where thee he got/cost him eyes’ suggesting that the torturous blinding of Gloucester, is somehow justified by the sin of having a child out of wedlock

  It is hard to feel that the punishment is at all proportionate to the crime here and Edgar’s moralising only comes across as disturbing.
• The Comfort Edgar provides, therefore, comes from unusual sources - primarily through the manipulation of theatrical artifice which generates philosophical  understanding and a form of justice
• Firstly, Edgar’s assumption of the role of Poor Tom allows King Lear to experience some form of anagnorisis upon his failures as a leader and even an appreciation of the essence of what it is to be human. 
• Lear sees Poor Tom and laments have taken ‘too little care’ of the ‘poor naked wretches’ reflecting upon his failure to take care of those in need - thus awakening a moral understanding within him.
• Furthermore, Lear claims that Poor Tom is none other than ’the thing itself…a poor unaccommodated man’ and that there is a profound truth behind the starving naked wretch - the disturbing realisation that this is all man amounts to. 
• Thus we can see that through the figure of Poor Tom, Lear achieves a fuller realisation of humanity and his flawed relation to it.
• Whilst there are certainly ambiguities surrounding it, in a not dissimilar way, Edgar provides Gloucester with a new understanding of life.
• • in not revealing himself to his father and leading him to the ‘cliffs’ of Dover, Edgar tells us ‘Why do I trifle thus with his despair is done to cure it.
• • By describing the immense cliff for which Gloucester stands before (‘how fearful and dizzy tis’ to cast one’s eyes so low) Edgar is engaging in an inherently theatrical act as Shakespeare’s theatre was primarily an aural experience focused on description.
• • This theatricality is compounded by the various deceptions Edgar applies after Gloucester has fallen - ‘it was some fiend’
  • Ultimately, Edgar leads his father to feel reborn and to abort his suicidal thoughts - ‘the clearest Gods have preserved thee/henceforth I’ll bear affliction’ Edgar thus provides us comfort because although he might apply unusual means, he offers us a vision of how one’s existential despair might be alleviated.
  • He also offers us a vision of theatrical manipulation that is applied for others’ benefit and not solely for one’s gain – as in the case of Edmund.
• Edgar offers us comfort through the disturbing entertainment of playing someone insane.

  Playing Poor Tom is the most compelling part of Edgar’s character, so much so, that in the original production of King Lear, Poor Tom featured prominently as an advertisement in the playbill for King Lear.

  In Shakespeare’s era, Madness was seen as a form of entertainment and Poor Tom’s lunatic language (‘the foul fiend follows me..’) would have been seen as a form of comic relief from some of the tragic excesses of the play