Do you ever get a line stuck in your head? It happens to me sometimes, a snatch of text just floats around in the back of my mind—sometimes because it’s profound, but sometimes just because I just like the sound of some nonsensical, out-of-context snippet, or other times because I can’t quite work out what it means.
This line is an example of the last one.
At the end of the aggressively depressing King Lear, when pretty much every main character is brought onstage dead or dying, one of the play’s key bad guys Edmund is dying after dueling his brother and is forced witness the fruits of his villainy: Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan are both dead, because they were both in love with him and killed one another out of jealousy. Edmund, seeing their corpses, says: “Yet Edmund was beloved.”
...what?
I mean, the meaning of the words themselves are pretty straightforward. But—what?
‘Yet Edmund was beloved.’
Is the tone here surprise? Edmund’s key trait - the subject of his opening and most famous speech - is that he is the bastard son of the nobleman Gloucester, an accident of birth that prevents him from achieving the things he desires in terms of respect, power… but not, in fact, his father’s love. He specifically says that, amongst all the other things that he and his legitimate brother Edgar share, ‘Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund / As to th’ legitimate.’
Edmund has never lacked love-- or rather, he has only lacked it in himself. His ambition and sense of social grievance drive him, not any personal feelings at all towards the father and brother he is perfectly aware love him.
Indeed, he plays on this love, persuading Edgar that he needs to flee their home to save his life, and persuading his father that only he loves him enough to reveal his beloved brother Edgar’s (fictional) plot against Gloucester’s life.
But perhaps the surprise comes from looking back as he sits dying from a wound inflicted by Edgar. All this time, when he thought he had nothing—from the play’s opening moments to the two women who killed each other for love of him—now he sees that he has squandered all that love he once had. He was beloved—but here he is, the women who loved him dead, the brother who loved him now his killer.
‘Yet Edmund was beloved.’
Is it a realization? King Lear is a play that obsesses over love while displaying very little of it. King Lear famously poses a fatally flawed test to see which of his three daughters loves him best, while Gloucester likewise mistakes which of his two sons truly loves him—though in his case, it’s thanks to active deception and manipulation by Edmund.
Even when it comes to Goneril and Regan, it’s immediately obvious that he’s manipulating them both and playing them off one another. When he confesses as much to the audience in a soliloquy, it’s equally clear he doesn’t really have an endgame in mind. He needs both for their wealth and power, and he’s happy to let them fight it out over him and take whoever wins.
So is the moment when he sees how deeply they truly felt for him? He already knows they’re dead, but does seeing the body spark something in him—the change, perhaps, that causes him to decide to try and save Lear and Cordelia’s lives?
Does Edmund, in recognizing himself as beloved, understand at last what love is—what love can do?
‘Yet Edmund was beloved.’
Maybe the point is simply that this is a completely insane reaction to the sight of two dead women. Not to keep talking about plays I don’t like, but King Lear’s unrelenting bleakness makes it among my least favorite tragedies. There is so little hope, or pity, or shame. Most of the characters seem incapable of any feeling, and must be tortured to wring some drop of humanity out of them.
But unlike all the other characters onstage, Goneril and Regan’s enemies who are still horrified by the sight of their bodies because they’re human, Edmund—well, thinks of himself, which is certainly in-character. That has been his lodestar, his motivation and drive through the entirety of the play: money, wealth, power, himself himself himself. He saw his family exiled and tormented and did his best to kill them. He let two women who he claimed to love kill one another for him. And his only response is—
What?
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