Counting the Attendants: Coda

Man, I really should read through the play more carefully before I go and have these giant brainwaves. Last night, looking at Act One, Scene Four, I find this stage direction:

Horns within. Enter LEAR and [four or more Knights as] attendants.

Lear immediately sends one of them off to fetch dinner. [Exit 1 Knight] Then, 35 lines later, he calls for dinner a second time, and he sends another knight off to find his fool. [Exit 2 Knight] Three lines later, there’s a bit of back and forth with Oswald, during which a third knight exits and then returns. 25 lines after that, he sends Knight 3 to find Goneril—[Exit 3 Knight]—and he sends another attendant to find the Fool. [Exit 4 Knight] That just leaves Lear, Kent, and (shortly) the Fool. No stage directions indicate that any of those vanished knights come back in.

So there’s my clever plan to shrink Lear’s visible support network, body by body. Shakespeare beat me to the punch. I suspect this is going to happen to me a lot.