What About Edgar?

I guess I haven’t talked about Edgar yet. It wasn’t until I did my rescripting and realized how the play seems to hinge upon him that I really started to think about his role. He suffers badly, but he survives. Not as badly as Lear, who goes mad, or Gloster, who goes blind—but he loses everything he has, like Lear, and he feels Gloster’s pain more acutely than anyone in the play beside the old man himself.

In fact, I think that’s Edgar’s special gift to the play: he has empathy with others. Most of his soliloquies and asides are on the subject of the suffering of others. If he gets the last speech in the play (which I quoted in my last entry), then he is also the last to feel it, to articulate it. He learns important things about suffering through sharing the suffering of others. And not just Lear and Gloster, either: I think a good Edgar makes time to feel the suffering of Kent and the Fool, of Oswald (whom he kills)—and even of Edmund, his arch-nemesis, his alter ego, the Vader to his Anakin.

Edgar isn’t the only character to empathise. The Fool does it quite a bit; Kent does it, on the rare occasion when his gruff exterior slips; and even Lear manages to feel a bit for his youngest daughter, by the end. But Edgar is the most consistently compassionate, and he’s one of the few who survive. In a play as dark and cheerless as Lear, his compassion is incredibly necessary; it makes him the audience’s most important confidante.

How nice, that Will decided to make this crucial character spend half the play skipping around, mostly naked, barking nonsense. You gotta love his sense of humour, sometimes.