KING LEAR: Act V

[ConnieAnnKirk]

Here's our thread for the final act of the play. How do you like or dislike the ending?

[friery]

Edmund really has some of the best lines in Lear.  Here's a soliloquy from Act 5, sc. 1:

To both these sisters have I sworn my love;
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy'd,
If both remain alive: to take the widow
Exasperates, makes mad her sister Goneril;
And hardly shall I carry out my side,
Her husband being alive. Now then we'll use
His countenance for the battle; which being done,
Let her who would be rid of him devise
His speedy taking off.

This passage strongly reminds me of Richard III's musings when he woos his future wife (over the body of her dead husband--and guess who had him killed?): "I'll have her, but I will not keep her long. What, I that kill'd her husband and his father: To take her in her heart's extremest hate, With curses in her mouth."

Edmund and Richard are alike in many ways.  Both are striving for the throne.  Both are almost casually cynical, both amoral.  And both, perhaps because of their soliloquys, draw us into their inner circle, making us almost co-conspirators.

[friery]

Near the closing of the play, Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms.  (SD, 5.3.307.)  Someone made the point that this is a reversed Pietà scene.