Ramblings

he does the same with legitimate, in a way that makes it so brilliantly obvious that both of these words have run his whole life. we the audience are going to have the word “base” beat to death in front of us because it is the word edmund cannot stop hearing. we don’t get to stop hearing it either!

also of interest is that he starts overflowing the iambic pentameter lines around “the curiosity of nations.” mangle the word "curiosity" however you like; you’re still gonna have a dangling “me” after ten iambic feet, and from there the pentameter falls to shit until “when my dimensions…” which i think is fun, because that’s when he’s talking about being “lag” of his brother, younger, behind, and the verse itself starts to lag out of rhythm. it overflows its bounds and become uncontainable, much like bastardy is an uncontainable category (🏳️‍⚧️), or SOMETHING, i dunno, i think it’s neat. this inheritance ain’t big enough for two sons of gloucester, and neither is the blank verse.

also, there is sexuality just all over his lines in this scene. obviously there’s the “lusty stealth of nature” bit, which goes into talking about how legitimate children are made with boring sex unlike bastards where you KNOW it was passion. plus the "whoremaster man" and "divine thrusting on" later. but also, loath as i am to say it (i do not believe in edgar/edmund incest and find that concept far more trite/boring than the shit they actually have going on), there’s, uh, there’s gotta be something in “top the legitimate,” right? i mean, regan and goneril are legitimate children too. also “divine thrusting on” and, of course, Let Me Have Lands By Wit. of course edmund’s always maybe talking about sex, because gloucester introduces him to people as “my chud son whose mom was soooooo sexy,” but it’s also all part and parcel of how bastardy as a concept represents fractures around social norms. one of my friends wrote a beautiful essay about how bastardy breaks the family (and even at its least threatening lives at its margins), and how edmund (and cordelia, and kind of all of the younger generation in this play) moves in and out of that state in a way that reveals legal legitimacy as a fiction. (which. well. you know what i'm gonna say about this, right. it's the same thing my friend said in their paper. you should have been what you are even under the maidenliest star, you say? 🏳️‍⚧️)

relatedly: he’s also once again in a weird gray area between nobility and servant-class, the acknowledged son of an earl (duke?) (checked. earl.) but with no noble claim to land. and he demonstrates this in his speech, too, by switching easily between blank verse and prose! his starting and ending soliloquies are in verse, but gloucester’s eclipses speech is in prose, and once he leaves the stage, edmund’s responding rant is also prose. now, yes, gloucester is speaking in prose despite being nobility; obviously this is not a one-to-one class marker thing, but it stands out to me because it’s edmund chameleoning himself into whatever shape he needs to be to talk like who’s got the power right now. bastardy as eternal liminal space etc etc. (there’s a line where gloucester calls him “sir” in the quarto but “sirrah” in the folio, which is, uh, a different class tone!)

(also, gloucester’s eclipses speech is all about bonds breaking between brothers, between fathers and sons, between king and subject, etc. i guess he throws in "love cools," but it could be familial love--there's nothing about marital bonds or women at all. when he’s paraphrasing to edgar later, edmund tosses in “nuptial breaches,” as if to highlight how much gloucester did not say that, which is so awesome and bitchy.)

2. by the way, let's all die.

(x)

3. by the way, let’s all die (reprise).

do you ever think about how edmund wrote this letter? which means he chose to end it "you should have his revenue for ever, and live the beloved of your brother," from edgar to himself? do you ever think about this and also about “yet edmund was beloved” and how the only thing edmund really truly wants more than power is for someone to love him? do we all ever think about that

4. addendum to the above

due to the trick of writing a letter addressed to oneself for any such purpose, the words “dear edmund hansen” have entered my mind. let’s move on

5. gloucester may be full of shit but “we have seen the best of our time” is an absolutely crazy line and hits somehow even harder in 2026 than it did the first time i read this play, which was in 2020.

not much to say here. i do like that he’s talking in prose; lear’s part of 1.1 is all extremely elevated fancy politicking language, even when he’s furious, and this scene feels like coming back to earth and looking at what’s going on among those who aren’t arguing over the most powerful position in the nation. (yet.) (edmund’s blank verse is perhaps aspirational.)

6. the fucking brothers gloucester, god damnit

in the folio version of the text, edmund says the phrase “a sigh like tom o’bedlam” just as edgar is entering. (in the quarto, it's "them o'bedlam," which is still close enough for what i'm getting at, if not as precise.) this is the first time anybody references bedlam at all in this play, never mind tom of. right as edgar is entering! is this just foreshadowing on shakespeare’s part? does edgar hear this? does the concept lodge in his brain? does he know that edmund’s “sigh like tom o’bedlam” is a feigned melancholy, like edgar’s is a feigned madness? do they ever have any idea how like each other they are?

because they don’t seem to right now. i’ve said it before: edgar grievously misunderstands edmund, but edmund doesn’t understand edgar all that well either. he’s soliloquizing at us saying edgar is too credulous to suspect anyone would do him harm, but that’s the first thing edgar says—he just doesn’t think it’s edmund who means him any harm. why would he? they’re brothers! 😃👍 ← pain nothing but pain

7. sight/vision/blindness language tracker

eclipses! maybe also "if it be nothing, i shall not need spectacles" from gloucester re: the letter? definitely lots about handwriting here. also the fact that edgar has not seen gloucester face-to-face and thus has to go on hearsay, but i feel like that's stretching the meaning of this category so i'm sticking to "eclipses make it dark"

8. textual trivia

i’ve already covered most of it, and a lot of the differences are unremarkable—every scene in act one has the same structure, just with lots of alternate words (eg. “bastardy” versus “bastardizing” in that one edmund line.) usually, the quarto is longer (it's thought that the folio was an edited version of the quarto for performance, although also nobody knows anything for sure?), but the following lines where gloucester carefully no-fear-shakespeares his speech are folio-exclusive--

but edmund's mean-ass paraphrase is quarto-exclusive. sure. and so is edgar's "sectary astronomical" quip, but edmund's offer for edgar to crash at his place is folio-exclusive, and i'm understanding why the folger just put both texts together, because it's a way better amount of lear per lear. maybe lear should have been even longer. did shakespeare and his company think of that

1.3

1. before anything else, i would like it on the record that goneril is right about everything and i won’t be convinced otherwise.

she’s literally right! is the thing! why the fuck does your senile old dad who has WILLINGLY RELINQUISHED THE MAJORITY OF HIS POWER (of course, he doesn’t think he’s done this, because to lear the personal and political are exactly the same and he’s still dad so he’s still majesty blah blah—) need 100 jacked dudes in fighting prime, ARMED, hanging around him all the time turning your place into a frat house? HE DOESN’T. GONERIL DID NOTHING WRONG. “killing her sister in the interest of a martial affair with the other backstabbiest person around was a little over the top” no it wasn’t have you listened to him talk

2. the royal pronoun parade

the pronouns here are mostly unremarkable. however 👆. who is us? either she means “my husband albany and i,” which is very possible—albany later seems confused that goneril and lear are conflicting, but that doesn’t bar him from having been the object of lear’s upbraiding; albany seems pretty chill with lear even though lear is a huge dick all the time—orrrrr it’s a sneaky little one-line royal we. because, you know, technically she is the next in line.

in the quarto, it gets way less ambiguous, like, two lines later: “if he dislike it, let him to our sister.” i mean, i guess this could be about her and albany if you really stretch the meaning of sister-in-law, but c’mon lmfao. in the folio version (and the folger text), this is changed to “to my sister.” if the folio text is indeed an edited-after-performance text, i think changing this one is a coward’s move and i will be having words with william shakespeare.

no blindness language here because this scene is like 20 lines, so:

3. textual trivia

she's so much meaner in the quarto, lmfao. quarto-exclusives:

(In case it’s just squares for you)