THE KING’S MAN 257
Shakespeare casts him out into
the wilderness to encounter one.
Poor Tom represents a misery
that Lear has never imagined—a
vagrant, tormented by demonic
voices, clothed only in a blanket,
and drinking from puddles mixed
with horse urine. Lear’s response,
which is to take off his own clothes,
signifies his final descent into
madness. He now conspires in
the destruction of his familial and
social identity. But there is also a
sense of fellowship in the discovery
that in his nakedness he is no more
than “such a poor, bare, forked
animal, as thou art” (3.4.101–102).
In this respect, King Lear has
often been seen as a socialist
play, in that it forces the king to
acknowledge his similarity to the
lowest social class (even though
Edgar is actually an earl’s son) and,
more importantly, to acknowledge
his own responsibility for Poor
Tom’s condition: “O, I have ta’en /
Too little care of this” (3.4.32–33). In
a radical challenge to contemporary
politics, the play features both a
king and an earl calling for a
redistribution of wealth, “So
distribution should undo excess, /
And each man have enough”
(4.1.64–65).More’s the pity
If the play is initially driven by
the need to strip man down to
his bare essentials, as anticipated
by Cordelia’s destructive use of
the term “Nothing,” it then begins
to move toward the “something”The blind Gloucester (right, Geoffrey
Freshwater) meets with the now-mad
Lear (left, Greg Hicks). Without his
sight, Gloucester finally realizes his
previous blindness toward Edmond.Unaccommodated man is no
more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art.
King Lear
Act 3, Scene 4upon which humanity is founded.
This “something” is the capacity to
feel pity. The play’s most virtuous
characters, Edgar and Cordelia,
repeatedly tell us of their emotional
reaction to other people’s suffering.
Edgar wonders at both Gloucester
and Lear: “O thou side-piercing
sight” (4.5.85); “my heart breaks at
it” (138); while Cordelia repeatedly
voices her pity for the father who
wronged her. Both characters
also attest to the efficacy of pity,
with Edgar being driven to rescue
his father from despair, and
Cordelia using her tears to gain
an army, before using the same
restorative drops to bring Lear
back to his senses.
By contrast, evil is defined
in the play as the absence of
pity, which leads in turn to an
absence of pitiful action. Goneril
and Regan allow Lear to wander
on the heath in a thunderstorm,
drawing forth language that
defines pity as that which
separates man from beast.
Thus, Cordelia observes, “Mine ❯❯I have no way, and therefore
want no eyes.
I stumbled when I saw
Earl of Gloucester
Act 4, Scene 1