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THE DRAMATURGICAL AND THEATRICAL HERITAGE
There are, however, two characters in King Lear who adopt a both visually
and verbally perceivable disguise. Kent and Edgar both appear as poor beggars
and thus conceal their identities not only to protect themselves but also to
make it possible to stay near the people they love and respect in order to
support them, as becomes evident from Kent’s speech: “If but as well I other
accents borrow, that can my speech defuse, / my good intent may carry
through it self so that full issue for which I raz’d my likenes.”!” In his first
soliloquy, Edgar also explains his intentions to change his appearance: “my
face ile grime with filth, / Blanket my loynes, else all my haire with knots, /
And with presented nakedness outface.”!”” Obviously, what makes his clothing
so unusual is the very lack of clothes and the exposure of nakedness. As for
his verbal disguise, Edgar, like Kent and Edmund, also uses prose passages for
dissimulation. When they pretend to be someone else, they speak in prose,
whereas they always establish direct contact with the audience and reveal
their intentions in verse, which is a distinctive feature of Shakespearean
characterization.'* Edgar’s diction as Mad Tom has been thoroughly explored,
and twenty-first-century Shakespeare scholarship takes it for granted that the
playwright’s main source for the language of Edgar’s demonic possession was
Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603),'” so I
do not intend to discuss this in detail. But alongside the role Edgar’s distinctive
use of language as Mad Tom has in concealing his identity, the character’s
verbal dissimulation also has the power to prevent his father’s suicide attempt,
another dramaturgical element that derives from morality plays. After meeting
Despair and Mischief, the latter of whom offers the protagonist a knife and
a halter, the traditional instruments of suicide,'*° Magnyfycence tries to
stab himself, and only Goodhope’s intervention prevents him from killing
himself.#l Howard Norland describes this element as “a stock response of
a sinner who recognizes the consequences of his errors.” In King Lear, it
is not the protagonist but Gloster who, at the cliffs of Dover, intends to cast
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Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. C3r—C3v.
Ibid., sig. E3r.
Vickers: Tragic Prose, 352.
The very idea originates from Kenneth Muir’s 1951 article “Samuel Harsnett and King Lear’;
yet it was Stephen Greenblatt’s 1985 essay entitled “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” that
further refined this connection. Cf.: Kenneth Muir: Samuel Harsnett and King Lear, The
Review of English Studies 2:5 (1951), 11-21; and Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare and the
Exorcists, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds.): Shakespeare and the Question of
Theory, New York, Methuen, 1985, 163-187.
Scattergood: Dressing the Part, 58.
“Magnyfycence: Shall I myselfe hange with an halter ? Nay! / Nay, rather wyll I chose to ryd me of
this lyve / In styckynge my selfe with this fayre knyyfe. Here Magnyfycence wolde slee hymselfe
with a knyfe. [...] Good Hope: Alas, dere sone! Sore combred is thy mynde, / Thyselfe that thou
wolde sloo agaynst nature and kynde.” Skelton: Magnyfycence, lines 2318-2324.
182 Norland: Drama, 185.
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