hecked up from the neck up

2.1

1. edmund and the servant class

welcome to another episode of "thinking too much about how edmund talks." first up: he's really familiar with curan. i mean, curan calls him "sir" and "you," but edmund calls him "thee," knows his name, and greets him first. goneril is this close with oswald, but oswald seems to be her personal servant (and curan doesn't show up again, if i remember right), and the later servants (like the ones who help gloucester) don't get names. from this, it's possible to assume that edmund is a lot more familiar with the servants in his household than anyone else in the play. thinking again about gloucester’s pun on “his breeding hath been at my charge,” edmund’s expenses being his—to what degree could you make an argument for edmund, as a bastard/illegitimate son, straddling the line between nobleman and member of the working household? i don’t know enough about the class strata of the time to really vouch for that, but it compels me! he gets his info and some of his power from the very position thrust upon him as a curse! (much like he sees his "naturalness," as opposed to lawfully-birthed tribes of fops, as giving him more vitality and proving that moral codes are stupid. i'm paraphrasing.)

anyway, you could 100% play this scene post-coital. the ear-kissing choreo's right there

2. edmund talkin'

what's with his verse, seriously? “the duke / be here / tonight / the bet/ter best” is iambic pentameter, but “this weaves / itself / perforce / into / my bus (/iness)” isn’t, unless you really mangle “business,” and the next few lines all stretch outside the meter by at least a syllable. (often with that one hanging syllable, which is called a feminine ending, which doesn't actually mean anything but also—hey—🏳️‍⚧️.)

i’m not smart enough about verse to make sweeping statements about what this means, but to me it really adds to the way edmund is winging this shit start to finish. he is NOT a long-term schemer like iago. he’s making this up as he goes along. oh, the duke’s coming? sure, hell yeah, i can work with that, probably! playing it by ear the whole way. and he almost wins! power of improv and total amorality <3

3. let's all be sickos about the gloucester brothers again

i've already talked about how they fundamentally don't understand each other, but additional evidence: edmund tries to hint that edgar has pissed off albany, and edgar is like, "what? no, i am one hundred percent certain i did not do that." not so credulous as edmund thinks!

also: edmund in this scene keeps referring to gloucester as "my father," not our father.

also ALSO: edmund "you"s both gloucester and edgar, which either says something crazy about class (see point 1) or something crazy about the level of warmth in this family, or, as always, both <3

4. look, sir, i bleed / gloucester, you motherfucker

i get that the situation is tense right now. but why is he always an ASSHOLE

because he just steamrolls right over edmund, right? edmund tries to tell a detailed story and demonstrate an injury that, yes, he gave himself, but which is also a genuine injury. we know this because regan and cornwall see it in a few lines. and gloucester just keeps asking: where is he? where IS he? as soon as he gets an answer, he interrupts edmund again to tell his servants to go after him. and only THEN does he let edmund tell the story. and edmund mentions his arm again!

to no result except gloucester going right back to ranting about edgar. again: i will give it to him that the situation is tense. but, uh, presumably also pretty tense for your other son, who just had to bodily fight the one you think is evil? edmund keeps repeating i here. i did this. i tried to save you. and gloucester's eventual concession is basically an afterthought:

"he did WHAT? what a fucking evil worm. oh shit the duke's coming uhhhhh i mean sure i guess you're my new favorite son or whatever." obviously you can play this however on stage, but i also think you can read it less as real thankfulness toward edmund—if he were actually concerned with edmund’s heroism, he would have said so earlier—and more as another way of running damage control: the son who was supposed to manage the land is a villain, so thank god i’ve got this other one, or this would be so inconvenient (“shame would have it hid”).

and then. and then.

THIS CUNT! not a damn WORD about edmund's wound until gloucester sees a chance to show off his family. this is the main reason i take issue with people who argue that edmund is doing all this for no reason, that his father doesn't actually treat him badly. like, obviously edmund doesn't get the treatment of a legitimate son! or, even if gloucester treats him as well as edgar, it's because gloucester treats them both like shit. this is another moment of a father using his children as capital, social or otherwise: edmund exists to farm the land if edgar becomes unsuitable, to win his family praise with his body. it's all about the image.

5. all of that said,

:(

6. edmund is still good at lying even if his audience isn't listening

the move he pulls here is genuinely great, except for how it's evil. "i tried to stop him, and he told me you'd never believe he was the evil one, because i'm the bastard and have everything to gain from this! ignore how i have everything to gain from this." king of DARVO. i saw your chanel boots mr. gloucester

7. i have yet to get over the one-line mention of edgar being lear's godson

makes it kind of crazy when you think about lear and poor tom bonding later. but also, what? what. also regan is then like "oh, edgar hung out with my dad's frat boy knights, right? that makes sense, because those guys suck too" and edmund is like "oh yeah he definitely did" and i really hope that's a lie. i hope it's a blaringly obvious lie. i want them to say this line and for the text to somehow visually cut to edgar wearing a pocket protector and getting shoved into a locker

8. now there is no damn way regan and gloucester are tight like this

i mean, it could be a crazy dynamic to emphasize, considering what's coming down the pipe in an act, but also: huh whuh

9. sight/vision/blindness tracker

other than "look, sir, i bleed," in this scene it's mostly about light and darkness. edmund emphasizes that edgar should flee at night because his father "watches," ie, stays awake, but also surveils. he then calls for light when he's ready to play the hero, and uses "here stood he in the dark" to cast edgar as a sinister figure—edgar remains in shadow; edmund gets illumination. (see also "threading dark-eyed night;" regan is using night in the same way as edgar, sort of, to flee her father. or something. i'm throwing spaghetti at the wall.)

10. textual trivia

pretty much all typographical stuff. the semi-interesting one is that gloucester's "i never [be]got him" (about edgar) is only in the quarto text

2.2

1.what the fuck is kent's fucking problem for real

if you forgot, this scene is host to the nuclear-button mother of all shakespearean insults:

in the past, my opinion on this has mostly been that it's hysterically over-the-top. which it is. he really didn’t need to do all that. but rereading, i’ve realized what maybe should have been obvious: literally all of kent’s insults toward oswald are either class-based or gender-based. everything boils down to either "you have no money" (eater of broken meats—leftover food; three-suited—fewer suits than a gentleman; hundred-pound—not paid well; worsted-stocking—ie, not silk-stockinged) or "you're a girrrrrrrrl" (proud, shallow, lily-livered, glass-gazing; even action-taking implies not wanting to fight). later, he'll call oswald "neat" (prissy, delicate). he'll call him a "wagtail," glossed as a "nervous or effeminate person," and rag on him for allying with goneril over lear. he'll call him a "barbermonger," which one of my copies footnotes as meaning “a pimp for barbers… hence who caters to the needs of effeminate men." tl;dr: jesus christ, kent, just say faggot.

i think this is the answer to the question of this scene, which is: why the fuck does kent do all this? there is literally no reason to do all this. there's no reason to start this fight! and he does start it—he’s standoffish and rude from the beginning, and he says “ay” when oswald asks if he’s of the house, which he definitely is not, because he’s not gloucester’s servant. why are we doing all this?

the best i can surmise is... well, kent hates goneril, to whom oswald is attached (at least in kent's mind) like a male anglerfish. more importantly, kent has a lot of strict ideas about how the world should work, and he's watching those ideas fail. he’s witnessing lear losing social power, being supplanted by people kent thinks are inferior (because of their gender and because they’re disrespecting the natural hierarchy of the monarchy). so oswald becomes a personification of everything kent hates the most: conniving, effeminate, gender-disobedient people trying to move above their station. (it’s notable that he calls edmund “goodman boy,” too—also insults based on class and masculinity! “goodman,” not “gentleman,” and “boy,” not “man.”)

but still, like… why? why are we starting fights for no reason? “anger has a privilege,” kent says, and it sounds like something that could come from lear’s mouth: come not between the dragon and his wrath, a wrath that takes on some sort of sacred power to elbow aside social rules, that must be respected no matter the mess it makes. when cornwall asks what his problem is, kent decries servants who flatter and enable their rulers:

you know, the exact thing kent didn’t do in 1.1. and yet here is this person who does bow and flatter to his employer (allegedly—i think oswald and goneril are being perfectly reasonable, lmfao), and oswald is being rewarded for it and kent is being punished for refusing to do so. oswald is his antithesis; oswald must be destroyed.

except, ironically, kent is doing exactly what oswald is doing, too: enabling lear to make a bigger and bigger mess. he's taking lear’s side against anyone who defies him, no matter what. sure, kent stood up for cordelia, but cordelia is a princess and a polite modest woman. oswald is lower-class and uppity; goneril and regan are bitches; edmund’s a bastard and a “boy.” kent’s regard for cordelia doesn’t stretch to any of them.

anyway, once again, “is kent a reactionary” longest thread in the history of king lear, closed after 3243458974357 posts,

2. speaking of, is this cornwall's opinion of cordelia, too?

is this cordelia reflected and distorted by cornwall's allegiance to regan? i mean, you could argue he wouldn't be entirely wrong. (i say this with the utmost love for cordelia in my heart.)

3. even gloucester agrees kent is being insane, btw.

at least, in the quarto he does:

unless he's lying to appease cornwall, but i think the argumentative tack here is interesting: it's not that caius-as-kent did nothing wrong; it's that you can't treat a servant of the king's like a p-p-p-POOR person! which, you know. you could argue that punishing a royal servant like they're nobody is exactly what kent is doing to oswald, also. anyway, gloucester status quo defender 4ever

4. cornwall and regan are such a great couple

and by "great," i mean they have perfected the art of the evil yes-and.

all they do is enable each other to be worse and it's fucking awesome. it's notable to me, too, that cornwall calls goneril "our sister" (as regan does earlier). obviously he means sister-in-law, but the our makes he and regan into one unit, both allied to goneril, both taking goneril's opinion seriously (which pretty much no man in this play does). when gloucester warns cornwall that the king will be upset, cornwall says he can take it, and regan backs him up instantly: well, what about how goneril will be upset? what then? they are so in-tune. they have each other’s backs so profoundly and they are going to use this drift compatibility to do torture later and i think that’s beautiful <3

5. sight/vision/blindness tracker

kent refers to the "epileptic visage" of lords who follow flattering servants, meaning distorted vision and judgment. once again... kent, i fear the call is coming from inside the house. inside your particular lord. (gee, kent, i bet you'd love to be inside your particular lord, etc, etc)

also, later, he asks his eyes to not even SEE the disrespectful house regan and cornwall are in, and references his "obscured" course of action. which remains obscured to me as well, buddy </3 what is the plan here </3

6. textual trivia

again, mostly tiny phrasing things, but only the quarto has gloucester's lines as printed in my third point here; in the folio, he goes right to, "well, uhhhhhh, the king will be REALLY MAD."