Neil Bowen on
Terence Hawkes:
• The first scene is improbable, and Lear’s question of how much do you love me is improper, and his equation of much love = much land is immoral
• 'Right from the first moments of the play, a wholly debased kind of 'loving' can be seen to operate throughout Lear's court and to inform all of its procedures'
• 'Where Lear reduces love to the level of the assessment of the price of land and property, Gloucester reduces love to the level of lust gratified by a whore'
• 'Edmund is illegitimate. Worse, his mother was a prostitute and he is a 'whoreson''.
• Edmund is a 'socially, politically and financially destabilizing force' expressing in his soliloquy a new, individualistic 'self-defining' understanding of identity and a 'powerful sexuality confined by no social restrictions'
• Modern audiences may feel more sympathetic to Edmund than Jacobean ones. Edmund's attractiveness is a necessary aspect of great villains.
• In the first half of the play, the presentation of Edmund pulls in the audience in opposite directions. He is emblematic of a wider breakdown 'of logic and coherence' that is 'inevitable whenever the periphery invades the centre': 'The story's clear injunction to us to disapprove of illegitimacy turns out to be drastically at odds with the rhythm, tone, the gestures, the alliterative and bodily momentum which builds up its overwhelming energy in Edmund's lines'. The 'logic' of the plot pulls us one way, but the 'rhetoric' of Edmund's character pulls us another.