[In the following essay, Kendall argues that the elaborate ceremony surrounding the trial by combat between Edgar and Edmund in Act V, scene iii of King Lear betrays the hollowness of the ritual and highlights the ineffectuality of all human constructs designed to establish legitimacy or affirm a natural order.]

GON.
An enterlude!

Broken rituals complicate the action of many of Shakespeare's plays: Ophelia's already “maimed rites” are further marred by an impromptu performance on the part of Hamlet; in Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio turns on Hero and puts an end to the marriage ceremony; in the scene of ritual combat in Richard II, King Richard throws his warder down and interrupts the action. King Lear, too, employs broken ritual as drama, opening with a scene steeped in what are apparently ceremonial exchanges¹—exchanges that are broken down by the intrusion of spontaneous and unexpected language (“Nothing, my lord.” “Nothing?”).² Such a disruption of ritual, of events meant to be patterned and ordered, foreshadows what is to come. In the world of King Lear, all concepts of order and justice, whether human or divine, are shortly to disintegrate into the vision of a mad king battered by an indifferent tempest on a wild heath. And yet, in the final minutes of King Lear, the play returns to an extreme form of ritual in the trial by combat of act V, scene iii.

No interruptions mar the confrontation between Edgar and Edmund. Curiously, just before the play produces an apocalyptic vision of injustice in the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, the action pauses. The consequences of the (brief) battle for England, the question of the fate of Lear and Cordelia, these things are set aside. Instead, the audience must pause in its contemplation of images of horror and view from beginning to end the uninterrupted workings of a ritualistic trial by combat.³ The conclusion of the play must wait; the audience is distracted from the plight of Lear and Cordelia (“great thing of us forgot!”). The characters consent to the enactment of a ritual that will hold the play in thrall until one or both of two combatants is released by death. And in the trial by combat we witness precisely what the rest of the play negates: a vision of deep order, a working out of natural and, of course, poetic justice.

In this scene, the scripted language of ritual—a language that in itself acts as an emblem of order and culture, a negation of chaos—displaces the spontaneous exchanges of the squabbling victors of the battle. The characters reverse the movement of the first scene of the play, replacing the unexpected, the disordered, the impromptu, with a script. The combat really is, to use Goneril's word, an “enterlude,” a brief play (in this case one that asserts a powerful vision of order) that, ironically, is contained within a script (King Lear) that undermines all visions of order. In the context of the larger play, this enterlude seems, I think, curiously displaced—a relic from a world that no longer exists.⁴ The descent of King Lear into chaos and inarticulate despair is being interrupted by a mini-drama so morally pat and so old-fashioned (even to a Renaissance audience) that, in the end, it fails to satisfy—even given that trial-by-combat might be the modus operandi of the King Lear world.⁵ This sudden obsession with ritual—seen in the calling of heralds, the ceremonial trumpetings, the concern with traditional wording and the rules of combat—finally becomes an empty and distorted assertion of order in a world that has already stripped ritual of meaning. The elaborate concern with rules, with scripted language, with rank and degree plays itself out to the end, only to reveal, finally, its essential meaninglessness. Naturally the way the combat is staged would have a profound impact on the way an audience might come to perceive this lack of meaning. Marvin Rosenberg notes that traditionally the combat has been staged as something formal, and directors have engaged in “such cliches as Edgar knocking Edmund's sword away and letting him retrieve it.”⁶ More recently, however, “the savagery of both fighters has been emphasized, they are in to kill—in the Dunn Lear, Edgar knifed the fallen Edmund repeatedly, and had to be dragged off.”⁷ A more formal staging would enhance the emptiness of ritual in the context of the Lear world; a savage battle—a choice in staging I would strongly favor—would exhibit the enormous gap between the language of ritual and what it supposedly represents.⁸ Either extreme of staging indicates that, in some sense, this trial by combat begins what becomes a final movement away from ritual and ceremony at the end of the play. It is an enterlude that, in calling attention to itself as artifact, reveals the fragility of all scripts, all artifacts of order, even the script of King Lear itself. Indeed, in the final lines of the play, Edgar directs us away from scripted language altogether.⁹

Justice has difficulty triumphing on stage in King Lear, not only because villains commit evil acts, but, more importantly, because they refuse to take law and the righteous pronunciations of other characters seriously. When Albany tells his wife “O Goneril, / You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face,” Goneril responds by calling him “Milk-liver'd man.” His moralism about women and evil (“Proper deformity [shows] not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman”) earns him the epithet of “vain fool.”¹⁰ Goneril makes of Albany's schoolbook morality something stodgy, something learned, perhaps out of a book of emblems; her energetic evil (and Edmund's) invigorates and dominates the play.

Asserting any kind of moral framework or justice in the play seems first to require getting the serious attention of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund in order to reveal to them—as well as to the audience—evidence of a deep order that must finally thwart evil. And Edgar and Albany attempt to do this. Not surprisingly, then, Goneril's very contempt toward any law that might attempt to bring her to account serves to introduce the trial by combat—as if the ritual were to undermine her position. She scoffs at Albany's ironic words as he reveals her wrongdoing, and proclaims the interchange an “enterlude”—she means a comic entertainment. Her contemptuous response, however, ushers in what might well be called an enterlude—but one of the didactic, rather than comic, ilk:¹¹ the ritual confrontation of Edgar and Edmund:

GON.
An enterlude!
ALB.
Thou art armed, Gloucester, let the trumpet sound.
If none appear to prove upon they person
Thy heinous, manifest, and many treasons,
There is my pledge. I'll make it on thy heart,
Ere I taste bread, thou art in nothing less
Than I have here proclaim'd thee.

(V.iii.89-95)

An “enterlude,” indeed. The language and action have become stylized; King Lear retreats into a world belonging to a much older kind of play.¹² Once the challenge is accepted, both Albany and Edmund reinforce how separate this piece of ritual drama is from the language and events that precede it. Suddenly, new rules are in effect. And Albany¹³ calls for the member of the cast necessary before the play can continue: “Alb. A herald, ho!” The herald, with his traditional language and station, makes this scene one of public ritual instead of private vengeance. And in Edmund's calling for sounding of the trumpet, and Albany's calling for the herald, they both, in some sense, subscribe to the ritual that will follow. Meanwhile, their joint focus on the niceties of a trial by combat turns us away from the action of King Lear as a whole (where Cordelia and Lear are in peril).

Rituals like the trial by combat imply by their very design that a kind of deep order exists in the world—an order inherent in nature, not imposed on it by human law.¹⁴ But the very terms in which Edgar chooses to reestablish himself and take his place in this (supposedly) natural order are suspect, since ritual—to reflect some kind of underlying order—tends to define itself in its own terms. Once governed by the heralds, the participants in the combat (should it follow uninterrupted to its conclusion) belong to a world where there is no conclusion but a just conclusion. The gods may appear not to be watching over the characters of King Lear, but in this instance, the gods can be replaced with heralds, trumpets, rules of combat. Lear and Cordelia may, contrary to all sense of justice, lose a battle, and later their lives, but the rules of ritual combat create justice from its outcome—whatever outcome. The combat might prove Edmund not to be the traitor that we all consummately know he is, but this conclusion would not undermine the ritual itself—since according to such ritual the final result must be just. This enterlude of combat thus provides an image of order that is like a snake with its tail in its mouth—endlessly circular and self-contained. The result of the trial by combat cannot really affect the audience's vision of the bleak chaotic landscape of the play, nor will it provide a lasting endorsement of Edgar's legitimacy: the result of the combat is undermined by the terms under which it is created.

In the introduction to Secular Ritual, Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff write: “In the repetition and order, ritual imitates the rhythmic imperatives of the biological and physical universe, thus suggesting a link with the perpetual processes of the cosmos. It thereby implies permanence and legitimacy of what are actually evanescent cultural constructs.”¹⁵ The word “legitimacy” has, I think, a special meaning when this statement is applied to King Lear. For “legitimacy” on a very basic level is precisely what Edgar is attempting to establish; among other things, the very concept of legitimacy and illegitimacy—and, as a corollary, primogeniture—that Edmund challenges early in the play is on trial here.¹⁶ Edgar, who has every reason to buy into a patrilineal ideology that privileges the first legitimate son, comes to displace the ideologically wicked Edmund.¹⁷ What Moore and Myerhoff suggest by their analysis of ritual, however, is that legitimacy—any kind of legitimacy—is a cultural artifact, not a God-given constant or a fact of nature. Edgar, by engaging in the combat, attempts to re-legitimize the concept of the legitimate (a concept eroded by the action of the play), to re-create his name and identity in a ritual that is also a kind of macabre baptism in his brother's blood (I have seen one production of King Lear in which Edgar, rising from his brother's body, has blood on his forehead—clearly the mark of Cain). But as a means of validating an identity as something concrete and “real” (i.e., something that cannot be created simply by the pronouncements of Cornwall or the machinations of Edmund), ritual here proves inadequate. Indeed, the exaggerated nature of all the ceremony surrounding the combat suggests, I think, that there is something hollow at its core. Myerhoff and Moore write: “Through form and formality it [ritual] celebrates man-made meaning, the culturally determinate, the regulated, the named, and the explained.”¹⁸ Here, however, the form of the ritual begins to reveal the indeterminate, the unregulated, the culturally unstable nature of the identity—the name, the status—that Edgar seeks to regain:

EDG.
Know, my name is lost,
By treason's tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit,
Yet am I noble as the adversary
I come to cope.
ALB.
Which is that adversary?
EDG.
What's he that speaks for Edmund Earl of Gloucester?
EDM.
Himself; what say'st thou to him?

(V.iii.121-26)

Identities here become part of formulaic responses—but what the formula at first establishes is the doubtfulness of the identity of the participants going into battle. Edgar makes no claim to any name. He has no identity other than that of mysterious combatant—he only plays a role; he cannot unselfconsciously be Edgar—nor has he been unselfconscious since first assuming the role of Poor Tom. His identity has been absorbed by the many roles he plays.¹⁹ And Edmund, in this formula, can, in his answer, claim only to speak for Edmund Earl of Gloucester, not as Edmund Earl of Gloucester. Moreover, he refers to himself in the third person. Roles take the place of names; names (or the acknowledged lack thereof) are simply part of the ritualistic form that at this stage reminds the combatants not of who they are, but of what they are. Edgar and Edmund are both here at one remove from their names. The roles they take up, however, in turn have the potential to give renewed meaning and determinacy to the name and title “Duke of Gloucester.” The initial questions that introduce the above exchanges, after all, are ones meant to determine who the combatants are:

ALB.
Ask him his purposes, why he appears
Upon this call o' th' trumpet.
HER.
What are you?
Your name, your quality? and why you answer
This present summons?

(V.iii.118-21)

Albany wants to know about purpose, but the herald asks first the ritual questions about name and station. The question that is, essentially, asked twice adds significance to the answer (which at the end of the combat will be an answer that establishes identity). The questions, of course, do not proceed from spontaneous curiosity, but are part of the form of the challenge.²⁰ Edgar's reply—or lack of reply—to the herald, artificially reinforces his later assertion of identity. The disguised knight who comes unknown to the lists is, after all, a very old literary convention. By participating in it, Edgar adds to the illusion that the identity that is going to be revealed and asserted is in some very deep sense “real.” But at this moment, as Edgar and Edmund face each other, they risk a realization of the fragility of the very concept of identity—a realization Lear experiences when he tries to find a person beneath the title of King. While Edgar, unlike Lear, does not seem to feel the need to ask “who is it that can tell me who I am?” (he believes he holds the answer to the riddle), the ritual itself comes to reveal how tricky such answers, and such riddles, can be.

When Edgar confronts Edmund he risks more than the knowledge of how fragile a thing identity is (something he should already realize from his experience as Poor Tom); he risks a confrontation with as deep and profound a chaos as any that Lear encounters in his mind. For rituals like the trial by combat are necessary only because the workings of order are not in actual fact clearly stamped on the natural world. Just as the Renaissance insistence on the validity of the great chain of being suggests a certain lack of security about hierarchy, the very order of ritual serves as a reminder of the threat of chaos: “And underlying all rituals is an ultimate danger, lurking beneath the smallest and largest of them, the more banal and the most ambitious—the possibility that we will encounter ourselves making up our conceptions of the world, society, our very selves. We may slip in that fatal perspective of recognizing culture as our construct, arbitrary, conventional, invented by mortals.”²¹ Essentially, what happens in the course of the trial by combat is that we, as audience, can see that Edgar is encountering himself in the act of creating himself—and his place in the social hierarchy. In facing a bastard brother who has usurped his name and title, Edgar is, to some degree, facing a distorted reflection of himself.²² Indeed, he equates himself with Edmund, saying that although his name is lost, “Yet am I noble as the adversary.” In winning the combat, too, Edgar's language is suggestive:

Let's exchange charity.
I am no less in blood than thou art, Edmund;
If more, the more th' hast wrong'd me.
My name is Edgar, and thy father's son.

(V.iii.167-70)

He proclaims himself to be Edgar (and it has been noted how much less compelling this is than Hamlet's similar assertion of identity—which occurs as Hamlet disrupts a ritual). Edgar does so, however, by comparing himself to Edmund and claiming “thy father” as his own. Edgar, in reestablishing his name and status as the legitimate son and heir to the title of Gloucester, shows his act of assertion to be similar in nature to Edmund's seemingly false creation of himself as Gloucester's heir—as the legitimate Duke of Gloucester. Edgar needs Edmund in order to define himself, but by so using his bastard brother, Edgar reveals the fragility of the constructs of legitimacy. Indeed, Nahum Tate, in rewriting King Lear into a comic form that raises few, if any, questions about established social order, makes important changes in the combat scene. These changes are designed to allay any uneasiness we might feel about the battle over the Gloucester inheritance. First, the moment that Tate's Edgar enters, armed, Albany exclaims, “Lord Edgar!” (V.v.14),²³ thus instantly giving the legitimate son a title and name. Secondly, upon seeing Edgar, Edmund is immediately smitten with guilt. He has clearly internalized and accepted the patrilineal ideology of primogeniture and legitimacy. Thirdly, Edmund states he may well not be Gloucester's son at all, since his mother “disdaining constancy, leaves me / To hope that I am sprung from nobler blood, / And possibly a king might be my sire / … Who 'twas that had the hit to father me / I know not” (V.v.49-54). The idea that Edmund is not Gloucester's son at all changes the terms of the combat entirely, and, of course, frees Edgar from the taint of having committed fratricide.

Legitimacy was, of course, an important social concept in Renaissance England, and The Bastard was a stock villain in literary works—one has only to think of Don John in Much Ado About Nothing and Spurio in The Revenger's Tragedy. But the very vehemence with which both society and literature condemned bastardy and the begetting of bastards indicates an unease with the subject—an unease perhaps out of proportion to the practical difficulties bastards might pose to questions of inheritance or social position. The reaction against bastards may have come partially, I think, from the possibility that by their very existence they might raise questions about the artificiality of concepts of legitimacy. To Angelo, for instance, in Measure for Measure, bastards are counterfeit, not “true made,” and his language is excessive and violent in his assertion of this difference:

It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stol'n
A man already made, as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image
In stamps that are forbid. 'Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made
As to put metal in restrained means
To make a false one.

(II.iv.42-49)

To Angelo, making a bastard is as bad as committing murder. Bastards are “false”—the implication is that they are made in an entirely different manner than the legitimate. Actually, of course, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate is not in the making, but in the exchange of words that constitute the ritual of marriage. But to acknowledge this is to come close to raising the insidious and subversive question that Edmund asks, and that Angelo's language (and imagery of counterfeiting) would keep suppressed:

Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?

(I.ii.2-6)

Edmund peers into the abyss that ritual and convention attempt to cover; he consciously flouts the artificial order that covers chaos.²⁴ Interestingly, once Edmund has achieved the position he covets, it becomes in his interests to establish it as a socially conventional position within a conventional moral scheme. Hence, perhaps, Edmund's willingness to fight Edgar even though he need not:

In wisdom I should ask thy name,
But since thy outside looks so fair and warlike,
And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes,
What safe and nicely I might well delay
By rule of knighthood, I disdain and spurn.

(V.iii.142-46)

The trial by combat, should he win, would secure him in the social order. Edmund sounds, here, not unlike a social climber, as he shows himself to be even more chivalric than the “rule of knighthood” requires. He will use no loopholes to delay the combat, and he seems to embrace the opportunity to leave behind the shadowy status of the Renaissance illegitimate. For Edmund the outsider, conventions have little value; but once on the inside of society, his newly created self needs, and seems to crave, some way of establishing that that self was not self-created at all, but part of the natural universe.²⁵ We might see that Edmund's fall comes from a participation in the act of creation that Edgar is trying to bring about. Edgar absorbs Edmund into his plot—his scripted ritual of combat—and by so doing disarms Edmund, whose energy and ability to new-create himself came from the rejection of conventional scripts.²⁶ Goneril protests that Edmund's fall comes from trickery:

This is practice, Gloucester.
By th' law of war thou wast not bound to answer
An unknown opposite. Thou art not vanquish'd,
But cozen'd and beguil'd.

(V.iii.152-55)

Albany, as much a conventional moralist as Edgar throughout the play, responds as though stung to Goneril's undercutting of an act that has just appeared to reestablish some kind of justice in the world: “Shut your mouth, dame, / Or with this paper shall I stopple it” (V.iii.155-56). Albany's angry reaction draws attention to Goneril's claim. Her refusal to accept the results of the ritual combat are as dangerous to established morality as her statement that “the laws are mine” is “most monstrous.” This is especially true because, in some sense, by waiving his right to refuse combat, Edmund has been tricked by appearances into fighting his brother on his brother's terms. The ritual of combat, because it is conservative, traditional, should, of course, do just what it does here—lay bare the falseness of Edmund's assumed identity as Duke of Gloucester. Goneril, though, threatens to lay bare the artificiality of all tradition, ritual, and law.

Ritual, like law, only appears to be a part of the ordering of the universe. As mentioned above, the security of ritual covers a deep and fundamental insecurity about all of human artifice, culture, and order. In fighting Edmund, moreover, Edgar engages in the same kind of self-creation that his brother did (hence, I think, the reflective imagery within the dialogue concerning the combat). The legitimacy conferred by marriage, after all, is purely a cultural artifact, something created from nothing by going through a ritual—the marriage ceremony—that, like that of trial by combat, defines itself in its own terms. One is married when one has been married. Lear himself hints at the tenuousness of the kind of legitimacy (and legitimacy and morality become closely linked in the play) that marriage imparts to offspring:

Die for adultery? No,
The wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets.

(IV.vi.111-16)

Of course, Gloucester's bastard son is not, as it turns out, very kind to his father, but no less kind than Lear's daughters. When Edgar says “Edgar I nothing am,” he approaches the vision of the world that ritual and ceremony attempt to cover, the vision of the world where legitimacy, order, titles have no meaning. No wonder then that he uses the trial by combat to establish that his “name is Edgar.” This ritual, by its very nature, is designed to turn Edmund's vision of the world—one that would have it that might is right (or, rather, that whoever has ability will triumph)—into Edgar's moralistic version of the same—that right has might. The conclusion of the combat between Edgar and Edmund reinforces the image of ritual as order, justice, completion:

EDG.
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
EDM.
Th' hast spoken right, 'tis true.
The wheel is come full circle, I am here.

(V.iii.171-75)

Edgar, like Albany, has found morals and meaning in many of the events of the play. Here, Edmund accepts Edgar's moralistic vision of the world and his version of events—a change that presages his change of heart about the murders of Lear and Cordelia. Like most of Edgar's moralisms, however, this one, which crowns the scene of ritual combat and completes it, finally proves inadequate, hollow, and just a little too pat. As many critics have noted, it is also an astounding thing to say of one's father.²⁷ Moreover, the gods do not, in the final analysis, seem very just. Ensuing events will reveal the inadequacy of the entire trial by combat, of Edgar's assertions of identity, and of ceremony and ritual in general. The completion of this morality play acted out between Edgar and Edmund is “but a trifle.”²⁸

For, despite Edmund's words, the wheel has not yet really come full circle. The ritual combat which has captured the attention of the characters onstage, which has come to a pat conclusion with a tidy moral, is not the completion of that larger moving wheel, King Lear. Something great has been forgot, and that something undercuts all the bulwarks against chaos that the ritual combat set out to construct. The death of Cordelia and finally of Lear take the play beyond the scope of pat moralisms or proclamations of innate justice. The hollow effort of Edgar to re-create himself—without acknowledging that he is so doing—is not only circumvented by the reflection of his act in the creative act of Edmund, but by a sudden vision of the hollowness of all ritual.²⁹

The ritual combat of Edgar and Edmund is only an enterlude in the relentless spiraling of the play beyond the normal bounds of theater, beyond, in fact, anything that ritual can encompass. King Lear is itself in some sense a ritual, but one that ceremonially works to undermine all ceremony. William Frost notes of Cordelia and Lear that “these two personages have passed beyond ritual altogether at the close. They cannot be expressed or comprehended by any of its forms—this fact is their greatness and their tragedy.”³⁰ Edgar is left behind, to close the play. And there is reason, I think, to prefer to have Edgar as the speaker of these final lines (although Albany, too, after all his pat attempts to find morals in the events of the play, might speak them effectively as well). Edgar says this:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(V.iii.324-27)

This is a different Edgar from the Edgar who announced his identity and asserted that his father's blinding was an action of just gods. This final speech is a statement that is as anti-ritualistic as it is possible to imagine. Edgar sees that it is time to pass beyond the script and “speak what we feel,” not use the formulaic and deceptive language of ritual and order. The final two lines of the play, too, are a statement of the uniqueness of events: what has happened will not happen again.³¹ Again, this is a statement of anti-ritual; these events cannot participate in the repetitions that give to the world an artificial sense of meaning.

And yet this movement toward anti-ritual, toward the undercutting of all order and hierarchy and meaning is only an “image of that horror,” and an image that is itself ritualistic. For King Lear transforms the unique into the repeated, the chaotic into the ordered by the very act of being a scripted play. Perhaps ironically, it is through the ordered artifact of drama that the audience can come close to a vision of the void, and the very ritual that undoes itself finally contains itself.

The ritual trial by combat that seems to promise the restoration of a kind of order and justice may fail to do so, but the anti-ritualistic epilogue spoken by Edgar succeeds in reestablishing a sense of ceremony and order where words spoken in double script (the script of ritual combat and the script of King Lear) fail. Perhaps more than anything else, the enterlude of ritual combat prepares us to accept in the place of moralisms a simple expression of deep feeling.

Notes

1. Lawrence Danson, in Tragic Alphabet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 164, notes that the “love-trial is staged with all the pomp and symmetry which is ritual's way of setting words and gestures apart from their ordinary contexts.”

2. One can no longer write on King Lear without addressing the textual issues involved. While the jury may forever be out on the question of whether or not Shakespeare was responsible for the Folio revisions, the fact remains that we have two authoritative versions of the play. I have chosen the tighter, Folio version of the play to work with, although to use the Quarto would not substantially alter my argument. For ease of reference, all quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Where this conflated text inserts material from the Quarto, I have deleted that material and noted the fact. For a discussion of the two texts and their effect on our reading of the play and our understanding of Edgar, see Michael J. Warren, “Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar,” 95-107, in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978); see also Stephen Urkowitz, Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and The Division of the Kingdoms, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). For a discussion of the implications of having two authoritative texts, see Jonathan Goldberg, “Textual Properties,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 37:2 (1986): 213-17, and Marion Trousdale, “A Trip through the Divided Kingdoms,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37:2 (1986): 218-23.

3. Stephen Booth, in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), discusses the way in which the ending of King Lear is consistently delayed. He notes that “Edgar's victory—the triumph of virtue—has the feel of dramatic conclusion, and the lines that follow it offer an anthology of familiar signals that a play is ending,” 7. I agree, and view the combat as a play complete unto itself.

4. Rosalie L. Colie, in “King Lear and the ‘Crisis’ of the Aristocracy,” in Some Facets of King Lear, ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (London: Heinemann, 1974), notes that the trial by combat was an anachronism as far as the play's Renaissance audience was concerned, and that Edgar is to “prove himself by an old-fashioned and quintessentially aristocratic method, the formal trial-at-arms outmoded in the late sixteenth century as a customary proof. … The anachronism stresses the play's archaism. … With this episode we are back in the world of chivalry of which we have heard nothing in the play and to which, under normal circumstances, Edmund the bastard could never have aspired,” 208.

5. G. Wilson Knight, in The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen and Co., 1930), views the scene somewhat more optimistically, stating that “It is Edgar's trumpet, symbol of natural judgement, that summons Edmund to account at the end, sounding through the Lear mist from which right and wrong at this moment emerge distinct,” 194-95.

6. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 305.

7. Ibid.

8. Ritual, then, is a mediator in the same way that Howard Felperin sees morality and madness as being mediators. Felperin writes that “in the end, the play renounces its own mediations of morality and madness alike and redirects our attention to an undetermined reality that exists prior to and remains unavailable to both.” Shakespearean Representations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 104.

9. In Q, Albany speaks the final words of the play. For the implications of Edgar as speaker, see Warren, “Quarto and Folio,” 105. For the idea that Edgar's name makes him, historically, a good candidate for the kingship, see F. T. Flahiff, “Edgar: Once and Future King,” in Some Facets of King Lear, 221-37. In this article, Flahiff identifies Edgar with the King Edgar who drove the wolves from Britain. See also Donna B. Hamilton, “King Lear and the Historical Edgars,” in Renaissance Papers, ed. A. Leigh Deneef and M. Thomas Hester (Raleigh: The Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1983), 35-42.

10. These are the exchanges as written in the Folio. The Quarto version is longer: see IV.ii.31-49, 53-59, 62-68, in The Riverside Shakespeare for the Quarto dialogue.

11. Enterludes (somewhat old-fashioned entertainment at this time) came in two varieties, the entertaining and the didactic. Goneril refers to the former, but inadvertently introduces the latter.

12. Felperin, Shakespearean Representations, sees the Gloucester plot as closely related to the morality play tradition: “the air of contrivance that hangs about the Gloucester action is pervasive, and it smells of morality,” 94. Felperin sees this motion toward the morality tradition as mediating between characters and “the confusion of raw experience,” 101, and as gesturing toward a new kind of mimetic experience.

13. In Q, Edmund also calls for a herald. This emphasizes his interest in the socially accepted rules of combat, but the deletion of the line from the Folio makes Albany more central as a master-of-ceremonies presiding over the combat.

14. See, for instance, the introduction to Secular Ritual, ed. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, which discusses the ways in which secular rituals are created to reinforce the idea that order exists (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977).

15. Ibid., 8.

16. Phyllis Rackin, in “Delusion as Resolution in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 29-34, notes that Edgar challenges Edmund “dressed in all the formal splendour that the hierarchy can afford,” 32, and hence, as I see it, as a kind of force of order and legitimacy. She also states that “the representation is, at least from one point of view, a delusion,” 32.

17. Lynda Boose, in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's King Lear (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1986), notes that “having been cast out by the father and displaced by the rival brother, each struggles violently to get back into the family enclosure and inherit the privileges of the father … the very privileges that, by the laws of primogeniture … set up the competitive, ultimately fratricidal rivalry that this drama plays out,” 63.

18. Moore and Myerhoff, Secular Ritual, 16.

19. M. C. Bradbrook in Aspects of Dramatic Form in the English and Irish Renaissance (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983) notes of disguise on the Elizabethan stage that “there could be no such thing as a mere physical transformation. … A character could be really changed by the assumption of a disguise,” 37-38. Clearly, Edgar is changed by, among other roles, that of Poor Tom. And Alexander Leggatt notes, in King Lear (Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare [Boston: Twayne, 1988], 63), that “the sheer variety of his roles … makes him as much a chameleon as Richard III or Iago.” Janet Adelman, in the introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978), writes that “both of Edgar's decided actions—his killing of Oswald and his killing of Edmund—are performed in disguises that allow him to submerge himself in a role,” 16. For an insightful discussion of Edgar's relationship to his Poor Tom role, see William C. Carroll, “‘The Base Shall Top th' Legitimate’: The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38:4 (1987): 426-41. Carroll notes that Edgar “far out-tops even his brother's histrionic genius,” 485.

20. There is, of course, a parallel scene also using ritual wording in Richard II, I.iii.7-35. This trial by combat is broken off.

21. Moore and Myerhoff, Secular Ritual, 18.

22. Many critics, for example, have noted how interchangeable the names of the two brothers are. Carroll, “‘The Base Shall Top th' Legitimate,’” sees in the subplot a “doppelganger tale,” 439.

23. All quotations come from The History of King Lear, ed. Nahum Tate and James Black (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975).

24. Danson, Tragic Alphabet, writes that “Edmund reduces the traditional values of kinship to so many empty words—words without fixed meanings, but only the meanings we as individuals want to give them. … Edmund will define himself, choose his own words, and not accept society's evaluation,” 169. In this sense, Edmund's language is anti-ritualistic—until he joins Edgar in the trial by combat.

25. Jonathan Dollimore, in Radical Tragedy (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984), makes the interesting point that “Edmund's sceptical independence is itself constituted by a contradiction: his illegitimate exclusion from society gives him an insight into the ideological basis of that society even as it renders him vulnerable to and dependent upon it,” 201. I would further argue that he is co-opted into the ideological society he initially rejects.

26. In some sense, we can see Edgar here as what Stephen Greenblatt might call an improvisator, as well as someone engaged in an act of self-fashioning. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 222-54.

27. This quotation and Edgar's behavior on the “cliff” near Dover have proven to be the loci for discussions about Edgar's character. Leggatt, in King Lear, calls Edgar's words “repulsive” and notes that “there is unexpected, self-satisfied cruelty in his reference to the way the gods have punished Gloucester,” 62. Harry Berger, Jr., in “Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance,” in Shakespeare's Rough Magic, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), sees Edgar as committing “symbolic parricide,” 222-23. James Calderwood, in “Creative Uncreation in King Lear,” notes that “as a poete manque … he settles too readily for conventional forms and ideas,” 11. Stanley Cavell, in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), writes that “Edgar's capacity for cruelty … shows how radically implicated good is in evil,” 283. Adelman, however, in Twentieth Century Interpretations, notes that “the absolute goodness and nobility of Edgar … has been assumed in much of the criticism of the twentieth century,” 8. See, for example, Russell A. Peck, “Edgar's Pilgrimage: High Comedy in King Lear,” Studies in English Literature 7 (1967): 219-37, and John Riebetanz, The Lear World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), who writes that Edgar is a “most selfless intriguer,” 62, and “our Virgil,” 126.

28. For King Lear's use of the morality play tradition, see Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 59-63, 78-79; Alvin B. Kernan, “Formalism and Realism in Elizabethan Drama: The Miracles in King Lear,” Renaissance Drama 9 (1966): 59-66; Bridget Gellert Lyons, “The Subplot as Simplification,” in Some Facets of King Lear, op. cit.; Howard Felperin, op. cit. (and see also endnote 12).

29. Stephen Greenblatt, in “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), writes that “King Lear is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out,” 177.

30. William Frost, in “Shakespeare's Rituals and the Opening of King Lear,” 200, in Shakespeare: The Tragedies, ed. Clifford Leech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

31. David Scott Kastan, in Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), writes that “in Shakespeare's King Lear time proceeds with a vicious linearity. The past cannot be escaped, and the future offers neither redemption nor renewal. Youth will not be recalled, Lear will not be king again, and death is inescapable and final,” 104.