King Lear | Edgar (Character Analysis)
Edgar is Gloucester's legitimate son. His half-brother Edmund frames him, letting on to Gloucester that Edgar is impatient for his inheritance and means to kill his father. Edgar is forced into hiding, and he adopts the disguise of "Poor Tom," a mad Bedlam (from Bethlehem hospital, an asylum for the insane) beggar. During the raging storm into which Goneril and Regan have forced Lear, Edgar finds himself in the same hovel with the mad king and Lear's Fool. Acting mad is perhaps the best disguise for Edgar since the insane were invisible in Elizabethan society, quickly dismissed and rarely...
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