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Poor Tom: Living "King Lear"
King Lear is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king―Edgar―has often seemed little more than a blank, ignored and unloved, a belated moralizer who, try as he may, can never truly speak to the play’s savaged heart. He saves his blinded father from suicide, but even this act of care is shadowed by suspicions of evasiveness and bad faith.
In Poor Tom , Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received understandings―and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that the part of Edgar is Shakespeare’s most radical experiment in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as “Poor Tom of Bedlam,” and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses―undead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in King Lear , close attention to this particular part can shine stunning new light on how the whole play works.
The ultimate message of Palfrey’s bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there.
In Poor Tom , Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received understandings―and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that the part of Edgar is Shakespeare’s most radical experiment in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as “Poor Tom of Bedlam,” and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses―undead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in King Lear , close attention to this particular part can shine stunning new light on how the whole play works.
The ultimate message of Palfrey’s bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there.
- GenresLiterary Criticism
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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February 25, 2026
Prelude - The Hanging Man
“In a corner of one of El Greco's pictures, lost in the folds of sky or curtain, floats a strange mustard-colored sufferer. The figure is naked, arms aloft, lacking a parachute but somehow resisting gravity —unless he isn't, and he is falling like a stone through yellow space. He is invisible to the casual eye. El Greco painted him, and then pretended that he hadn't. Perhaps no one else has ever seen him, this barely palpable ghost, wrapped away beneath the picture's nominal theme. Because if we don't magnify the details, he disappears into the yellow drapery wash. But once we have seen him, whether we see him or not when we look once more at the entire picture, he is there. Unborn or deceased or waiting, the homunculus is. The picture is never the same again.
What to do with this image? Perhaps hurry to accommodate him to men or myths that we already know. Maybe it is Christ: witness the thin bent knee, the emaciated cheek and shadow of a beard, the vague suggestion of a loin cloth. And the arms are almost certainly there-unfinished, lost in yellow, but begun at sixty degrees, the painful angle rendered by the slumped head. It must be Christ, suffering and almost forgotten. He is in the last days, perhaps the already-dead days. It is the deposed saviour, strung out in an eternal Easter Saturday, between death and return, denied even a hell to harrow. He is in-between: perhaps once a Christ, perhaps one day once more, but for now, for this world's visible duration, the hanging man.
But then it isn’t Christ at all. It isn’t anyone that has ever had a name. No: it is a vision of what Gottfried Lelbniz calls the Incompossible(1): things that do have existence, because imagined by the creator, but not In this world. Here, in the given dispensation, they are not possible!
When i think of Shakespeare, there is one figure above all that El Greco's hanging man suggests. It Is Poor Tom In King Lear. Tom too is called forth from forgotten deeps; he demands attention in his Isolation and ongoing excruciation; and then, the gaze of witnesses once upon other things, he disappears.
Did he ever exist? If he did, where did he come from? And if he did, where does he go?
Really, the homunculus is a wash of paint, nothing more. Or a painter's joke, a secret to keep from the patron. Like the repetition of some compulsive cartoonist unable to resist doodling, again and again, his woebegone everyman. Let the whimsy be.
Yet the Image remains.
[(1) Incompossibility is an idea expressed at many points in Leibniz's writing. A characteristic instance: "I have reasons for believing that not all possible species are compossible in the same universe, great as it is; not only with regard to things existing at the same time, but also with regard to the whole succession of things. My view…is that there must be species which never did and never will exist, since they are not compatible with that succession of creatures which God has chosen.... The Law of Continulty states that nature leaves no gaps in the orderings which she follows, but not every form or species belongs to each ordering." New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed, Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 307.]
“The body's verticality does not work in the usual way of late El Greco, when his saints, madonnas, and martyrs are given impossibly long torsos or limbs, suggesting that some sort of extra-mundane, denaturing stretching is already at work in the heaven-headed body. Instead the verticality is found in the tiny body's hanging suspension, which might be falling, or might be ascending, but either way the feet do not touch ground. The body merges into and out of surrounding space, such that it can seem a smear of the elements, a brief mirage shaped by the slurry of cosmic matter, rather than a distinct constitution of its own. It is paint and color, or a coalescence of strokes that may at any moment separate into formless matter.
Of course there is no such thing as empty space. The figure is in fact flushed through with stuff. I see bruised streaks of light, an invisibly teeming void. To one side are globed shapes, indeterminate whether maternal or vegetable or rock, and below are curves, like swans' wings or breaking waves or the crest of a waterfall. It is impossible to say whether the figure has issued from the wash, or resists its sucking pull, or is simply bearing up as the wash tumbles upon and around him. Or perhaps there are no fluids at all, and he is fathoms deep in gas. Who knows what element is his? (2)
[(2) I am not alone in finding El Greco's smallest details expressive of tragic pathos. the Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev reports that in one of the unfinished books of his great contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, Nature Is Not Indifferent, Eisenstein "studied the structure of pathos, going beyond its limits to the uttermost degree of influence. Eisenstein understood perfectly both the laws of pathetic composition and the price which has to be paid for it. Choosing a detail from an El Greco painting (only a detail), a stormy landscape in Toledo, he wrote: the colours 'shimmer... with no less animation of holy excitement than as if the blood-stained artist had been alive, crucified on one of the crosses." Kozintsev wryly com-ments, in words that speak profoundly to Shakespeare's Tom (and to Shakespeare): "I don't think that the demon in the innermost recesses of his blood ever managed to get enough sleep." King Lear, the Space of Tragedy: The Diary of a Film Director, trans. Mary Mackintosh (London: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1977), 225.]
The here and now, the visible and quotidian, hardly defines pos-sibility. Mundane apprehensions of space and time cannot reach to this vision at all. Seen and not-seen, it is neither inside nor outside, living nor dead, human nor inhuman. Is it in space at all, if its thing-ness isn't certain, or if it doesn't coincide with others? Is it in time, if it isn't assuredly an event? It is at one glance pure cuspal potentiality; at another glance, silently screaming prevention. It looks like a whirl of nothing, but perhaps this smeared patch is in fact memory's incipience: the nothing awaits; it foreshadows. It is incompossible with the present dispensation-but there are more things in the world than can be measured by the daily senses. Perhaps it promises, however distantly, to resolve the crippling antinomies of our temporal half-life. This floating spiritualized being is here. It is possible.
Unless it isn't. Unless he is flatly impossible, doomed to be strung out in incommensurable solitude.
Surely the price of this kind of presence, a shuttered presence, is awesome and awful loneliness, rarely spoken, even more rarely heard.
Does the yellow man exist? Or is he dead? Or waiting?
In more than one way, El Greco’s homunculus is lost. I cannot find him. I cannot find where he came from, I cannot place him in his home, he has retreated only god knows where. He came out of my printer, quite unexpectedly. I hadn't called for him at all. I wanted to print the full picture and instead I got a tiny fragment of it, some arbitrary zoom. It kept happening. Instead of neat framed miniatures I got faceless white beards, and tearful eyes glistening like moons in night-ponds, and this sole falling sufferer. And now I don't know which picture or mural it was, and because the yellow man is so small, and El Greco's jaundiced mustard color so ubiquitous, he has retreated back into nonbeing. And so here he is, falling through mustard space, through the casing air and the viewless winds, this single image the only trace of his possibility. All there is of him is my creased printout, taped to a board, curling and per-ilous. The image gathers a curious twinned pathos, partly of unwonted survival, partly of accident. Or rather, of an accident that has somehow stolen the gift of duration. Perhaps better to call it a life.
Tom's a cold.
Introduction
There are two Lear texts—some would say two Lear plays: the Quarto…and the Folio…i think of Lear not as two distinct works, but as a single play world enterable via two phantom versions. These two versions are at once separate, superimposed, simultaneous, successive (each behind and ahead of the other) and mutually re-visioning. I take them as coincident takes upon, or alternative snapshots of, the same series of mo-ments. The action moves in and out of evident focus, sometimes close and palpable, sometimes receding into apparent nothingness.
Each playtext, then, is an imperfect witness, an imperfect remem-berer, an imperfect predictor of action that is at once in the past and unfinished, and therefore both here and yet to come. Neither text is quite in possession of the scenes it reaches for. There is often more than meets the eye: and occasionally less. At times a scene may only resemble-or perhaps re-assemble-possibilities that the given tech-nology, of word or body, struggles to harness. Both texts have scenes that the other does not, counterfactual what-ifs that exist in one take and not the other, that are at once in the world and gone from it. But they are no less real for that. Because in this playworld, history and ontology are essentially subjunctive. More than that, things do happen in more than one way at once. Actions are fractured and fractal, whether a spoken word or extemporary gesture or plotted event-point; they are shuttered and cut-up; they are instantaneously recessive with self-superimpositions; they are endlessly occurring differently, both in the moment of utterance and in the ongoing history of the play through ages and places.
…In plotting the Glouster story Shakespeare draws on a brief inset narrative from Phillip Sydney’s Arcadia detailing the sorry plight of a sinful king with two sons. He favors the bad son and realizes his mistake too late.
. . . . .
Interlude:
Let’s imagine a single idea; an idea in the form of an image; an image that composes a character.
The idea is something like this: look once, and see nothing. It doesn't exist; it is a white sheet, a cipher without a figure: nothing. And then the nothing moves. Its body is moved through or into places. It mutates.
The nothing becomes radically open to possibility. The it becomes a he.
But then we look again, and he has moved again, and that thing he was is once again nothing.
Now imagine the same figure rendered by brushstrokes. Each brushstroke composes just this tension. The whole part is this brush-stroke, and each gesture or scene or feeling in it: each is this brush-stroke, variously magnified, more or less smeared or grainy, revealing more or less of the actions that make the brushstroke. Always the brushstroke is anguish, of being nothing and anything, one then the other, unpredictably.
And now imagine that this brushstroke is sounded. The sound is at once silence and a scream. The sound, in turn, is a feeling body, shivering or palpitating or suddenly arrested, as though into a statue or numbed icon — and always, again, all at once. And this in turn is what is seen: a movement without clear articulated lines, a ghost of some once-known figure, from dream or myth, who is yet, here and now, the stranger.
. . . . .
The initial negativity of Edgar is remarkable.[1] It is an exercise in penumbral characterization, a figure who is a substance is shade.
[1] Harley Granville-Barker: "Edgar himself is indeed dismissed from the second scene upon no more allowance of speech than ‘I’m sure on't, not a word'— with which the best of actors may find it hard to make his presence felt; and at our one view of him before he had been left negative enough." A later footnote of Granville-Barker's is astute: "it follows that upon these lines [Edmund's false allegations) we cannot be brought to a very close knowledge of Edgar too. Give him the same scope, and he must either get on the track of the truth or prove himself as great a fool as his father. So Shakespeare, now and at his next appearance, does as little with him as possible. This delays-and dangerously — our gaining interest in him. But a play survives sins of omission when the smallest sin of commission may damn it." Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol. 1 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1930), 273,
Scene 3: Tom’s Voices
“The Edgar-part has the second most lines in the play, close to half of them in the voice of Tom (the proportion is impossible to measure). But remarkably little attention has been paid to what Tom says, as distinct from the figures effect on or relation to others. There are limited exceptions, but in the main Tom is heard rather than truly attended to.
Onstage, offstage, even in the time-straddling world of reading: the odd plaintive refrain aside, his discourse tends to be passed by as "lunatic irrelevancies" or a "string of nonsensical phrases," or else it is heard en masse as symbolic white noise.
“But let's do something different. Let's not be like Kent, who hears a noise in the straw and dismisses it as a mere "grumble."* Listen closer—turn the sound up—and the grumble becomes something other.
Shakespeare knew what he was doing here, what he was asking of actor and auditor. Tom's idiom is radically indifferent to customary dialogical rules. It evokes some hobgoblin remainder, part ruined prose, part ruined verse, part ruined song. Verse is the mode of gentles like Edgar; prose of servants and beggars; song of the suprapersonal community —but all are at once recalled and scotched in Tom's vocative superflux.
The effect is instantly to detonate decorum—sociopolitical, linguistic, and theatrical. Customary orders, customary affiliations, customary relations of word to person or to deed, are suddenly in-secure.
And a determining aspect of this shattered decorum is meta-performative. In having to juggle and switch between the scraps and splinters of various theatrical grammars, the Tom-part profoundly disturbs the recognitions upon which Shakespeare's actors habitually rely..
What is more, the scripting scrambles the usual decorum of cue and response, cause and consequence. He ends most of his allotted speeches with either a repeating cue-word or a song or a pantomime of action, all of which travel beyond the nominally cued response, strangely erasing his audiences. Who speaks? To whom does he speak? Whose actions are spoken? How possibly to tell?
Tom speaks in a few recurring registers, one after the other, as though on three loops, played at different speeds, and intermittently cutting one across the other.
First, brisk accumulating parataxis, in which he lists examples of privation, punishment, vice, instruction, or degradation. The rhythms here are peculiarly strung between oral and textual: partly imitating the muttered catechisms of frightened or bowed obedience, partly imitating the accumulating clauses and pleonastic iterations of nondra-matic didactic prose. The imperatives build and build, uninterruptible, and all an auditor can do is wait.
Second, snatches of chant or song, as Tom drifts from all addressees, harmonizes with who knows what voices, and again his listeners are impotent to react. Even if the song or pantomime coincides with another actor's speech-cue—as it does no less than five times (six if we include Tom's exit-cue, closing the whole scene) —that actor cannot speak to the cue, or to Tom at all, but must instead act at an angle from his cuer, to all intents ignoring his continuing singing or babble or paroxysms.*
[*FN: The exception to this is Lear: whenever the Lear-part is cued by the Tom-part, he speaks either to or about the beggar. But the others— first the Fool (twice), then Kent, finall Gloucester (four times) —do not respond to Tom at all.]
Third, the brief refrains in which Tom returns to intimate creaturely mbodiment: "through the hawthorn blows the cold wind" (probably a floating quotation from a popular ballad*) and in particular, “Tom's a cold" (the standard cry of the Bedlam or Abraham man).
[*FN: The line appears in “The Friar of Orders Grey - Thomas Percy]
Again, there is no clear address in these refrains; they can be played as an ap-peal, perhaps for pity, perhaps for an embrace-if so, an appeal that is certainly ignored once (by Gloucester, at TLN 1926) and quite possibly each time.*
[*FN: Importantly, however, these refrains are heard and understood by the offstage audi-ence; whereas much in Tom's part resists or even repels understanding, the refrains speak a powerful sentimental challenge.]
The part's isolating effects are orchestrated at the most fundamental level. It is often uncertain whether it is Tom who speaks at all. Perhaps it is another, to whom he is hostage or which he hosts. Sometimes such stolen voice can be explained as demonic possession —as he says in the Quarto text, "The foul fiend haunts poore Tom in the voice of a nightingale, Hoppedance cries in Toms belly for two white herring, Croake not blacke Angell" (III. vi. 34; italics in original).
But demonic possession opens rather than ends the matter. There were demons for every occa-sion, an attendant for every passion: not least the passion of theater, the demonic stage par excellence, which the Tom-show vehemently concentrates.*
[*FN: Jan Kott: "Edgar's demonology is no more than a parody, a travesty of contemporary Egyptian dream books and books on witchcraft; a great and brutal gibe, in fact.... From the point of view of a Job who has ceased to talk to God, they are clowns. Clowns who do not yet know they are clowns.]
Another distinctive habit is Tom's rapid oscillation between speaking of himself in the first and the third persons, often in the same speech. The effect is to destabilize any notion of possessed identity, or to make the assumption of "I" or "my" seem like a beleaguered refuge from daily subjective dispossession. Of course we might say that Tom is not himself, he is Edgar; by the same token, the unstable shifts in self-reference actualize the fact that identity here is a multiparty struggle.
No other name in the play is so repeated by its owner: this alone suggests a life lived in the second person, as though rented, or entered, rather than a simple predicative gift. But precisely the fact that he sees himself as though someone else-Tom's a cold—can bring home all the more pathetically the fact of lonely comfortless affliction.
Whatever Tom's discourse is, it is not as socialized as conversation —indeed it often barely deserves to be called dialogue. For instance, the questions addressed to the naked beggar repeatedly leave the Tom-actor with nothing to say. For all the part's garrulousness, it is written so as to be repeatedly dumbfounded by false cues, or by questions, directly addressed to Tom, that the actor cannot answer:
What art thou that dost grumble there I'th' straw?
Did st thou give all to thy Daughters? (TLN 1832)
Ha's his Daughters brought him to this passe? (TLN 1844)
Could'st thou save nothing? (TLN 1845)
Would'st thou give 'em all? (TLN 1845)
Is it the fashion, that discarded Fathers, Should have thus little
mercy on their flesh? (TLN1853-54)
Is man no more then this? (TLN 1882-83)
Thou ow's the Worme no Silke; the Beast, no Hide; the Sheepe, no
Wool.... Ha? (TLN 1883-85)
What are you there? (TLN 1907)
What is the cause of Thunder? (TLN 1933)
Equally, it is often unclear to whom Tom speaks. Even simple state-ments, like "Blesse thy five Wits," defy illocutionary certainty. Who is he blessing? Does he remain trapped inside his torture, watched like dogs upon a bear? Are the five wits his, as in five minds (or as he says in the Quarto text,
, "Five fiends have beene in poore Tom at once" IV. i. 61).
CONTINUED UNDER THE EDWARD BOND’s “Lear”
“In a corner of one of El Greco's pictures, lost in the folds of sky or curtain, floats a strange mustard-colored sufferer. The figure is naked, arms aloft, lacking a parachute but somehow resisting gravity —unless he isn't, and he is falling like a stone through yellow space. He is invisible to the casual eye. El Greco painted him, and then pretended that he hadn't. Perhaps no one else has ever seen him, this barely palpable ghost, wrapped away beneath the picture's nominal theme. Because if we don't magnify the details, he disappears into the yellow drapery wash. But once we have seen him, whether we see him or not when we look once more at the entire picture, he is there. Unborn or deceased or waiting, the homunculus is. The picture is never the same again.
What to do with this image? Perhaps hurry to accommodate him to men or myths that we already know. Maybe it is Christ: witness the thin bent knee, the emaciated cheek and shadow of a beard, the vague suggestion of a loin cloth. And the arms are almost certainly there-unfinished, lost in yellow, but begun at sixty degrees, the painful angle rendered by the slumped head. It must be Christ, suffering and almost forgotten. He is in the last days, perhaps the already-dead days. It is the deposed saviour, strung out in an eternal Easter Saturday, between death and return, denied even a hell to harrow. He is in-between: perhaps once a Christ, perhaps one day once more, but for now, for this world's visible duration, the hanging man.
But then it isn’t Christ at all. It isn’t anyone that has ever had a name. No: it is a vision of what Gottfried Lelbniz calls the Incompossible(1): things that do have existence, because imagined by the creator, but not In this world. Here, in the given dispensation, they are not possible!
When i think of Shakespeare, there is one figure above all that El Greco's hanging man suggests. It Is Poor Tom In King Lear. Tom too is called forth from forgotten deeps; he demands attention in his Isolation and ongoing excruciation; and then, the gaze of witnesses once upon other things, he disappears.
Did he ever exist? If he did, where did he come from? And if he did, where does he go?
Really, the homunculus is a wash of paint, nothing more. Or a painter's joke, a secret to keep from the patron. Like the repetition of some compulsive cartoonist unable to resist doodling, again and again, his woebegone everyman. Let the whimsy be.
Yet the Image remains.
[(1) Incompossibility is an idea expressed at many points in Leibniz's writing. A characteristic instance: "I have reasons for believing that not all possible species are compossible in the same universe, great as it is; not only with regard to things existing at the same time, but also with regard to the whole succession of things. My view…is that there must be species which never did and never will exist, since they are not compatible with that succession of creatures which God has chosen.... The Law of Continulty states that nature leaves no gaps in the orderings which she follows, but not every form or species belongs to each ordering." New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed, Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 307.]
“The body's verticality does not work in the usual way of late El Greco, when his saints, madonnas, and martyrs are given impossibly long torsos or limbs, suggesting that some sort of extra-mundane, denaturing stretching is already at work in the heaven-headed body. Instead the verticality is found in the tiny body's hanging suspension, which might be falling, or might be ascending, but either way the feet do not touch ground. The body merges into and out of surrounding space, such that it can seem a smear of the elements, a brief mirage shaped by the slurry of cosmic matter, rather than a distinct constitution of its own. It is paint and color, or a coalescence of strokes that may at any moment separate into formless matter.
Of course there is no such thing as empty space. The figure is in fact flushed through with stuff. I see bruised streaks of light, an invisibly teeming void. To one side are globed shapes, indeterminate whether maternal or vegetable or rock, and below are curves, like swans' wings or breaking waves or the crest of a waterfall. It is impossible to say whether the figure has issued from the wash, or resists its sucking pull, or is simply bearing up as the wash tumbles upon and around him. Or perhaps there are no fluids at all, and he is fathoms deep in gas. Who knows what element is his? (2)
[(2) I am not alone in finding El Greco's smallest details expressive of tragic pathos. the Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev reports that in one of the unfinished books of his great contemporary Sergei Eisenstein, Nature Is Not Indifferent, Eisenstein "studied the structure of pathos, going beyond its limits to the uttermost degree of influence. Eisenstein understood perfectly both the laws of pathetic composition and the price which has to be paid for it. Choosing a detail from an El Greco painting (only a detail), a stormy landscape in Toledo, he wrote: the colours 'shimmer... with no less animation of holy excitement than as if the blood-stained artist had been alive, crucified on one of the crosses." Kozintsev wryly com-ments, in words that speak profoundly to Shakespeare's Tom (and to Shakespeare): "I don't think that the demon in the innermost recesses of his blood ever managed to get enough sleep." King Lear, the Space of Tragedy: The Diary of a Film Director, trans. Mary Mackintosh (London: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1977), 225.]
The here and now, the visible and quotidian, hardly defines pos-sibility. Mundane apprehensions of space and time cannot reach to this vision at all. Seen and not-seen, it is neither inside nor outside, living nor dead, human nor inhuman. Is it in space at all, if its thing-ness isn't certain, or if it doesn't coincide with others? Is it in time, if it isn't assuredly an event? It is at one glance pure cuspal potentiality; at another glance, silently screaming prevention. It looks like a whirl of nothing, but perhaps this smeared patch is in fact memory's incipience: the nothing awaits; it foreshadows. It is incompossible with the present dispensation-but there are more things in the world than can be measured by the daily senses. Perhaps it promises, however distantly, to resolve the crippling antinomies of our temporal half-life. This floating spiritualized being is here. It is possible.
Unless it isn't. Unless he is flatly impossible, doomed to be strung out in incommensurable solitude.
Surely the price of this kind of presence, a shuttered presence, is awesome and awful loneliness, rarely spoken, even more rarely heard.
Does the yellow man exist? Or is he dead? Or waiting?
In more than one way, El Greco’s homunculus is lost. I cannot find him. I cannot find where he came from, I cannot place him in his home, he has retreated only god knows where. He came out of my printer, quite unexpectedly. I hadn't called for him at all. I wanted to print the full picture and instead I got a tiny fragment of it, some arbitrary zoom. It kept happening. Instead of neat framed miniatures I got faceless white beards, and tearful eyes glistening like moons in night-ponds, and this sole falling sufferer. And now I don't know which picture or mural it was, and because the yellow man is so small, and El Greco's jaundiced mustard color so ubiquitous, he has retreated back into nonbeing. And so here he is, falling through mustard space, through the casing air and the viewless winds, this single image the only trace of his possibility. All there is of him is my creased printout, taped to a board, curling and per-ilous. The image gathers a curious twinned pathos, partly of unwonted survival, partly of accident. Or rather, of an accident that has somehow stolen the gift of duration. Perhaps better to call it a life.
Tom's a cold.
Introduction
There are two Lear texts—some would say two Lear plays: the Quarto…and the Folio…i think of Lear not as two distinct works, but as a single play world enterable via two phantom versions. These two versions are at once separate, superimposed, simultaneous, successive (each behind and ahead of the other) and mutually re-visioning. I take them as coincident takes upon, or alternative snapshots of, the same series of mo-ments. The action moves in and out of evident focus, sometimes close and palpable, sometimes receding into apparent nothingness.
Each playtext, then, is an imperfect witness, an imperfect remem-berer, an imperfect predictor of action that is at once in the past and unfinished, and therefore both here and yet to come. Neither text is quite in possession of the scenes it reaches for. There is often more than meets the eye: and occasionally less. At times a scene may only resemble-or perhaps re-assemble-possibilities that the given tech-nology, of word or body, struggles to harness. Both texts have scenes that the other does not, counterfactual what-ifs that exist in one take and not the other, that are at once in the world and gone from it. But they are no less real for that. Because in this playworld, history and ontology are essentially subjunctive. More than that, things do happen in more than one way at once. Actions are fractured and fractal, whether a spoken word or extemporary gesture or plotted event-point; they are shuttered and cut-up; they are instantaneously recessive with self-superimpositions; they are endlessly occurring differently, both in the moment of utterance and in the ongoing history of the play through ages and places.
…In plotting the Glouster story Shakespeare draws on a brief inset narrative from Phillip Sydney’s Arcadia detailing the sorry plight of a sinful king with two sons. He favors the bad son and realizes his mistake too late.
. . . . .
Interlude:
Let’s imagine a single idea; an idea in the form of an image; an image that composes a character.
The idea is something like this: look once, and see nothing. It doesn't exist; it is a white sheet, a cipher without a figure: nothing. And then the nothing moves. Its body is moved through or into places. It mutates.
The nothing becomes radically open to possibility. The it becomes a he.
But then we look again, and he has moved again, and that thing he was is once again nothing.
Now imagine the same figure rendered by brushstrokes. Each brushstroke composes just this tension. The whole part is this brush-stroke, and each gesture or scene or feeling in it: each is this brush-stroke, variously magnified, more or less smeared or grainy, revealing more or less of the actions that make the brushstroke. Always the brushstroke is anguish, of being nothing and anything, one then the other, unpredictably.
And now imagine that this brushstroke is sounded. The sound is at once silence and a scream. The sound, in turn, is a feeling body, shivering or palpitating or suddenly arrested, as though into a statue or numbed icon — and always, again, all at once. And this in turn is what is seen: a movement without clear articulated lines, a ghost of some once-known figure, from dream or myth, who is yet, here and now, the stranger.
. . . . .
The initial negativity of Edgar is remarkable.[1] It is an exercise in penumbral characterization, a figure who is a substance is shade.
[1] Harley Granville-Barker: "Edgar himself is indeed dismissed from the second scene upon no more allowance of speech than ‘I’m sure on't, not a word'— with which the best of actors may find it hard to make his presence felt; and at our one view of him before he had been left negative enough." A later footnote of Granville-Barker's is astute: "it follows that upon these lines [Edmund's false allegations) we cannot be brought to a very close knowledge of Edgar too. Give him the same scope, and he must either get on the track of the truth or prove himself as great a fool as his father. So Shakespeare, now and at his next appearance, does as little with him as possible. This delays-and dangerously — our gaining interest in him. But a play survives sins of omission when the smallest sin of commission may damn it." Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol. 1 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1930), 273,
Scene 3: Tom’s Voices
“The Edgar-part has the second most lines in the play, close to half of them in the voice of Tom (the proportion is impossible to measure). But remarkably little attention has been paid to what Tom says, as distinct from the figures effect on or relation to others. There are limited exceptions, but in the main Tom is heard rather than truly attended to.
Onstage, offstage, even in the time-straddling world of reading: the odd plaintive refrain aside, his discourse tends to be passed by as "lunatic irrelevancies" or a "string of nonsensical phrases," or else it is heard en masse as symbolic white noise.
“But let's do something different. Let's not be like Kent, who hears a noise in the straw and dismisses it as a mere "grumble."* Listen closer—turn the sound up—and the grumble becomes something other.
Shakespeare knew what he was doing here, what he was asking of actor and auditor. Tom's idiom is radically indifferent to customary dialogical rules. It evokes some hobgoblin remainder, part ruined prose, part ruined verse, part ruined song. Verse is the mode of gentles like Edgar; prose of servants and beggars; song of the suprapersonal community —but all are at once recalled and scotched in Tom's vocative superflux.
The effect is instantly to detonate decorum—sociopolitical, linguistic, and theatrical. Customary orders, customary affiliations, customary relations of word to person or to deed, are suddenly in-secure.
And a determining aspect of this shattered decorum is meta-performative. In having to juggle and switch between the scraps and splinters of various theatrical grammars, the Tom-part profoundly disturbs the recognitions upon which Shakespeare's actors habitually rely..
What is more, the scripting scrambles the usual decorum of cue and response, cause and consequence. He ends most of his allotted speeches with either a repeating cue-word or a song or a pantomime of action, all of which travel beyond the nominally cued response, strangely erasing his audiences. Who speaks? To whom does he speak? Whose actions are spoken? How possibly to tell?
Tom speaks in a few recurring registers, one after the other, as though on three loops, played at different speeds, and intermittently cutting one across the other.
First, brisk accumulating parataxis, in which he lists examples of privation, punishment, vice, instruction, or degradation. The rhythms here are peculiarly strung between oral and textual: partly imitating the muttered catechisms of frightened or bowed obedience, partly imitating the accumulating clauses and pleonastic iterations of nondra-matic didactic prose. The imperatives build and build, uninterruptible, and all an auditor can do is wait.
Second, snatches of chant or song, as Tom drifts from all addressees, harmonizes with who knows what voices, and again his listeners are impotent to react. Even if the song or pantomime coincides with another actor's speech-cue—as it does no less than five times (six if we include Tom's exit-cue, closing the whole scene) —that actor cannot speak to the cue, or to Tom at all, but must instead act at an angle from his cuer, to all intents ignoring his continuing singing or babble or paroxysms.*
[*FN: The exception to this is Lear: whenever the Lear-part is cued by the Tom-part, he speaks either to or about the beggar. But the others— first the Fool (twice), then Kent, finall Gloucester (four times) —do not respond to Tom at all.]
Third, the brief refrains in which Tom returns to intimate creaturely mbodiment: "through the hawthorn blows the cold wind" (probably a floating quotation from a popular ballad*) and in particular, “Tom's a cold" (the standard cry of the Bedlam or Abraham man).
[*FN: The line appears in “The Friar of Orders Grey - Thomas Percy]
Again, there is no clear address in these refrains; they can be played as an ap-peal, perhaps for pity, perhaps for an embrace-if so, an appeal that is certainly ignored once (by Gloucester, at TLN 1926) and quite possibly each time.*
[*FN: Importantly, however, these refrains are heard and understood by the offstage audi-ence; whereas much in Tom's part resists or even repels understanding, the refrains speak a powerful sentimental challenge.]
The part's isolating effects are orchestrated at the most fundamental level. It is often uncertain whether it is Tom who speaks at all. Perhaps it is another, to whom he is hostage or which he hosts. Sometimes such stolen voice can be explained as demonic possession —as he says in the Quarto text, "The foul fiend haunts poore Tom in the voice of a nightingale, Hoppedance cries in Toms belly for two white herring, Croake not blacke Angell" (III. vi. 34; italics in original).
But demonic possession opens rather than ends the matter. There were demons for every occa-sion, an attendant for every passion: not least the passion of theater, the demonic stage par excellence, which the Tom-show vehemently concentrates.*
[*FN: Jan Kott: "Edgar's demonology is no more than a parody, a travesty of contemporary Egyptian dream books and books on witchcraft; a great and brutal gibe, in fact.... From the point of view of a Job who has ceased to talk to God, they are clowns. Clowns who do not yet know they are clowns.]
Another distinctive habit is Tom's rapid oscillation between speaking of himself in the first and the third persons, often in the same speech. The effect is to destabilize any notion of possessed identity, or to make the assumption of "I" or "my" seem like a beleaguered refuge from daily subjective dispossession. Of course we might say that Tom is not himself, he is Edgar; by the same token, the unstable shifts in self-reference actualize the fact that identity here is a multiparty struggle.
No other name in the play is so repeated by its owner: this alone suggests a life lived in the second person, as though rented, or entered, rather than a simple predicative gift. But precisely the fact that he sees himself as though someone else-Tom's a cold—can bring home all the more pathetically the fact of lonely comfortless affliction.
Whatever Tom's discourse is, it is not as socialized as conversation —indeed it often barely deserves to be called dialogue. For instance, the questions addressed to the naked beggar repeatedly leave the Tom-actor with nothing to say. For all the part's garrulousness, it is written so as to be repeatedly dumbfounded by false cues, or by questions, directly addressed to Tom, that the actor cannot answer:
What art thou that dost grumble there I'th' straw?
Did st thou give all to thy Daughters? (TLN 1832)
Ha's his Daughters brought him to this passe? (TLN 1844)
Could'st thou save nothing? (TLN 1845)
Would'st thou give 'em all? (TLN 1845)
Is it the fashion, that discarded Fathers, Should have thus little
mercy on their flesh? (TLN1853-54)
Is man no more then this? (TLN 1882-83)
Thou ow's the Worme no Silke; the Beast, no Hide; the Sheepe, no
Wool.... Ha? (TLN 1883-85)
What are you there? (TLN 1907)
What is the cause of Thunder? (TLN 1933)
Equally, it is often unclear to whom Tom speaks. Even simple state-ments, like "Blesse thy five Wits," defy illocutionary certainty. Who is he blessing? Does he remain trapped inside his torture, watched like dogs upon a bear? Are the five wits his, as in five minds (or as he says in the Quarto text,
, "Five fiends have beene in poore Tom at once" IV. i. 61).
CONTINUED UNDER THE EDWARD BOND’s “Lear”
March 11, 2020
Thoroughly absorbing! Wonderful insights.
September 30, 2020
Extraordinary, so imaginative and perceptive.
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