(DOWNLOAD) "Voices of Violence: Medieval French Farce and the Dover Cliff Scene in King Lear (Critical Essay)" by Comparative Drama * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

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Title: Voices of Violence: Medieval French Farce and the Dover Cliff Scene in King Lear (Critical Essay)
Author : Comparative Drama
Release Date : January 22, 2009
Genre: Performing Arts,Books,Arts & Entertainment,Professional & Technical,Education,Language Arts & Disciplines,
Pages : * pages
Size : 88 KB

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The strangest moment in act 4, scene 6, of Shakespeare's King Lear involves the humiliation of the recently blinded Gloucester at the hands of his supposedly loving son. In the so-called Dover Cliffscene Gloucester wrongly believes that the mad beggar Poor Tom, who is actually his son Edgar, has led him to the place where he intends to commit suicide. In order to fool him, Edgar describes the cliff in poetic but horrifying terms, and he then steps away from his father, whose attempt to jump results in only a fall to the ground. Edgar then disguises his voice yet again, though not as Poor Tom, to convince Gloucester that he has fallen from the cliff but was rescued by the gods from a demon at the top. The trick evidently persuades Gloucester that he has been saved by a miracle, and he decides to go on living. (1) Although Edgar says that his mistreatment of Gloucester is an attempt to cure him of his despair, it remains gratuitous and difficult to explain within the context of the play, so in this essay I would like to move beyond Lear to examine the scene in relation to drama that provides surprising analogues to it: medieval French farce featuring blind men and their cruelly deceptive guides. Scholars have long agreed that the idea of a suicidal blinded man who wants to be led to a cliff to end it all came to Shakespeare through the story of the Paphlagonian king in book 2, chapter 10, of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. The king, father of one legitimate and one illegitimate son, is persuaded by the lies of the bastard son Plexirtus to turn against the legitimate heir, who is named Leonatus. After the bastard usurps the throne, he blinds his father, a development that resembles the involvement of Gloucester's bastard son Edmund with those who blind his father. Then Leonatus, in order to help the king, returns from a nearby country where he has disguised himself as a soldier. The despairing king asks Leonatus to help him find a rock from which to throw himself, but Leonatus refuses. (2) Thus the story sketches the rough outlines of the subplot of Gloucester and his sons, but significantly, it stops short of anything resembling the episode in which Edgar tricks his father into believing he has jumped from the cliff. So the passage from Arcadia does nothing to explain Edgar's surprising and rather cruel response to his father's death wish, nor does the redoubtable Geoffrey Bullough in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare have anything to say about the way the scene plays out. (3)