King Edmund Character Analysis

In his book entitled This Great Stage: Image and Stricture in King Lear, Robert Heilman describes King Lear, a play written by William Shakespeare, as “a play about the ways of looking at and assessing the world of human experience… we see, ultimately, the shrewd, sharp-thinking, worldly people (Goneril, Regan, Edmund) balanced against a set of apparently helpless incompetents (Edgar, the Fool, Lear)” (Heilman 28). King Lear is a tragedy, which entails nothing going right for the play’s characters. One of the antagonists in the story that contributed to the tragic plot of the story is Edmund. This paper will focus on Edmund’s character, his decisions throughout the play, and his relationships with the other characters. To know more about his

He gives Cornwall a letter, “which approves him an intelligent party to the advantages of France” (3.5.12-13). Mistaken for his loyal service, Cornwall still makes him the Earl of Gloucester, which indicates the success of his plan from the beginning. Due to his greed and self-centeredness, he did not have any second thoughts about what the consequences of his actions might be. He chooses loyalty rather than blood because his loyalty is his key to getting what he wants. This can be seen in the following lines when he chooses to betray his father: “I will preserve in my course of loyalty, though the conflict be sore between that and my blood” (3.5.22-24). This shows the kind of villain that he was in the play: the villain that manipulated others into believing false accusations and the villain that is willing to betray his own

This creates irony in the play because he always addresses nature, despite being the unnatural son. Going back to This Great Stage: Image and Stricture in King Lear by Heilman, he discusses two different views of nature in the play and the view of nature that can be applied to Edmund is nature “as vital force, the physical drive and the impulses of the individual, the totality of unfettered and uncriticized urgencies” (115). At the start of the play, he already addresses nature in the following lines: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess. To thy law My services are bound” (1.2.1-2). He addresses nature as a deity, which can back up his actions. When Edmund betrays Gloucester, he gave more importance to loyalty rather than his own family and he says, “nature thus gives way to loyalty” (3.5.3-4). At the end of the play, Edmund and Edgar duel and Edmund falls. He says that “wheel is come full circle” (5.3.209), describing how everything that he had done came back to him, which is how nature