Scene one is all about Edmund. First, he asserts his power over both Goneril and Regan. Second, he pledges wrath to Lear and Cordelia.
Gloucester appears for the final time in Scene two. He tells his son, “Grace go with you, sir.” Gloucester has found a measure of redemption, just like Lear.
Cordelia and Lear lose the battle. In captivity, Lear imagines more bliss for them. Cordelia wants a showdown with her sisters. She doesn’t get it. Her final words begin with a pregnant declaration (“For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down”) and end with an unanswered question.
Edgar appears to judge Edmund, the covenant breaker, but ends up condemning Gloucester. He defends his actions theologically. “The gods,” he tells Edmund, “are just and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.” Oddly, he applies that dictum to his father. Because Gloucester committed adultery, the gods took his eyes by the son that infidelity occasioned. Why does Edgar go after his father instead of Edmund?
Edmund’s deceit is so thorough that he’s come up with an alibi for Cordelia’s death: she committed suicide out of grief.
Lear enters, and the play comes to a horrific end. First, Lear connects Cordelia and the Fool (“My poor fool is hanged”). Next, he utters the most nihilistic line of blank verse ever penned: “Never, never, never, never, never.” Finally, he dies with the hope that Cordelia lives.
In the Folio, Edgar offers the play’s final words. His despairs about the next generation: “we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” He articulates a tragic view of the future. Lear and Gloucester governed a better world. The one Edgar and Albany control will get worse.
Experiments in Criticism 