What About Gloucester?

Since I’m on the subject: Gloucester. Or Gloster, as it’s pronounced (and as Shakespeare wrote it most of the time). Funny old guy. Seems a bit randy in the first scene, joking about whores with his son in earshot. Then, in scene two, he becomes a stock character, the befuddled father, the absent-minded gull. Polonius on ritalin. Later he becomes more self-righteous, and even a bit political. He sticks his neck out to help Lear, and gets his eyes gouged out for his trouble. Spends the rest of the play moping. Tries to jump off a cliff that isn’t there.

It makes us puzzled: why is Gloster so inconsistent? Why does he perform so many different functions in the play? The blinding scene is so horrific, so memorable, that the “suffering” Gloster strikes us as the most real: a flesh-and-blood human, not a character sketch. Constructing a real character, then, would seem to revolve around that moment, when Gloster’s sight is destroyed. You bend and twist the early scenes so that they seem to foreshadow it, and you milk the later scenes for all the pathos you can get. It’s not difficult, really; Shakespeare put in tons of not-so-subtle references to eyesight and blinding, so all you have to do is dwell on that motif. Right?

Wrong. Gloster starts his stage life as a lecherous buffoon, and I think it’s a greater disservice to the play to try to hide that fact. His references to eyesight (for example, from 1.2, “If it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles”) are not fraught with anticipated torment or loss. They are throw-aways—the sort of comments one makes about the things one takes for granted.

I think the whole point of Gloster is that tragedy can strike anyone at any time. Gloster has flaws, but they aren’t tragic flaws, and he’s definitely a man more sinned against than sinning. I think, in nearly every scene Gloster has, he is confronted with evil and guile far beyond his understanding. He struggles to understand, but by the time he starts to see things clearly, he’s trapped in the thick of it—and his sight is torn from him.

But I do think that those early references to eyesight are valuable, because the audience knows what will happen to poor Gloster’s eyes. The more he fumbles with his spectacles onstage, the more the audience will want to reach out to protect him from the unspeakable fate that awaits him. Lear is the play’s grizzly bear, and we want him to survive because he is a rare, majestic creature. Gloster is the play’s teddy bear—disposable and valueless, yet precious in a way we can’t articulate.