King Lear

Edgar leads Gloucester to the supposed edge of Dover cliff — which is, in fact, flat ground. He constructs the height entirely in words: fishermen below the size of mice, a ship reduced to a buoy, samphire gatherers hanging halfway down. Gloucester gives him a purse, says farewell, and leaps. He falls forward onto level earth. Edgar, stepping into a new character — a bystander on the beach below — tells Gloucester he has survived a fall of ten masts in height. The thing that led him to the edge, Edgar says, was a fiend with a thousand noses and eyes like full moons. The gods preserved him. Gloucester accepts this. "I do remember now: henceforth I'll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / 'Enough, enough,' and die." The therapeutic fiction has worked. Edgar's aside, spoken before the leap: "Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it." Then Lear arrives — fantastically dressed with wild flowers, his mind ranging freely across law, war, and sex in the way that madness sometimes produces unexpected clarity. He recognises Gloucester's voice. Gloucester reaches to kiss his hand. Lear says: "Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality." Lear speaks on justice with sudden lucidity: "Through tatter'd clothes great vices do appear; robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it." He tells Gloucester to look with his ears — to see how the justice rails at the thief, and ask himself which is which when you swap their clothes. Gloucester says he sees the world "feelingly." Lear tells him: "When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools." Cordelia's attendants arrive and Lear runs. A gentleman notes to Edgar that one daughter "redeems nature from the general curse which twain have brought her to." Oswald arrives to collect the bounty on Gloucester's head. Edgar kills him and searches the body. Goneril's letter to Edmund is there — a direct instruction to murder Albany so Edmund can take his place. Edgar buries Oswald and keeps the letter. Gloucester prays he will not be tempted to end his life again before the gods are ready. Edgar takes his arm. Drums can be heard in the distance.