Shakespeare's creation Edgar from King Lear and Elizabethan attitudes toward mental illness.

Edgar, Poor Tom OBedlam, fiend, peasant, messenger, and avenging knight - just who is the character that assumes every last(predicate) these personas? Shakespeare often plays with the motif of madness and ambiguous roles, but no character dramatically embodies these ideas as extensively as Edgar in office Lear. It has often been said that Shakespeare understood human nature better than any man ever did. If that is the case, then we withstand to believe that his creation, Edgar, represents many different levels of the human condition. In fact, tally to critic Harold Bloom, on the title page in the setoff Quartro edition of King Lear, Shakespeare assigns a prominence to Edgar rarely afforded inessential characters in his plays:

M. William Shak-speare: His True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters. With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam....

Bloom goes on to say that Sullen in Shakespeare has the strong import of melancholia or depression, a variety of madness, assumed by Edgar in his disguise as Tom of Bedlam. So we are lead to believe by Shakespeare himself that Edgar, in his persona of Tom OBedlam, is so mad. But what about the other personalities attributed to Edgar throughout the play?



To record the complexity of the character we must examine all the aspects of his temper exhibited in the various roles he plays.

We can start by stating the obvious: Edgar is the legitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester and stands to inherit his fathers title and estate. Edgars attitude as the godson of King Lear gives him access to the main British court and all the prerogatives that come with it. Edgar is also the older...

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