King Lear I.ii.1-22

Excerpt: King Lear I.ii.1-22 - Edmund’s monologue

Context: The audience has been briefly introduced to Edmund as Gloucester’s bastard son in the first scene, but learned little about his personality. Edmund introduces the second scene with the first soliloquy of the play.

Analysis: A tension between the personal and the public appears to prop many of the motifs seen in Shakespearean theatre; the character of Edmund, as a bastard child, embodies the issues of this discrepancy. Here Edmund voices an awareness of his own problematic existence as an illegitimate child in Britain. He identifies the “lusty stealth of nature” (11), asserting that marriage-less sex is wholly natural. The natural world cares not of the marital status of his parents, and thus he praises Nature as his “goddess” (1). Edmund identifies the inherent equality of all man that exists outside human conventions. He challenges the man-made parameters of what makes a son “legitimate”, arguing that he is just as intelligent and capable as Edgar: “my dimensions are as well compact / My mind as generous, and my shape as true” (7-8).

As he contemplates the complexity of his birth, Edmund employs some very Shakespearean wordplay. There exists a clear pun on the word “legitimate” as a term of legality as well as status of birth. There is even a touch of metadrama in line 18; by saying, “Fine word, ‘legitamate’”, Shakespeare provokes analysis of the term. His invocation to Nature proves him to be a deeper and more profound figure than those with their eyes always towards financial gain, like Goneril and Regan.

This soliloquy complicates Edmund, because this monologue may connote considerations of Edmund as something of a revolutionary, frustrated by societal boundaries and attempting to invalidate constructed norms. At least personally, I always favor the characters that try to fight the system. Unfortunately, Shakespeare characterizes Edmund as inexcusably Machiavellian in his methods to disrupt the hierarchy, what Edmund calls a “plague of custom” (3). Either way, Edmund is not as clearly a 100% evil figure as Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, or even Iago.


Lauryn Gold