The Homosocial King Lear: Sex, Men, and Women before the Valorization of Lust and Greed

Abstract

Wandering without his eyes, King Lear’s Earl of Gloucester stumbles upon his son, disguised as poor mad Tom, a Bedlam beggar. Gloucester asks Tom whether he knows the “way to Douer.” By way of a reply, Tom complains that he has been “scarr’d out of his good wits” (TLN 2245–2247; 4.1.56–57). In the quarto version of the play, Tom elaborates, saying that he has been possessed by “Fiue fiends,” the first of which is the fiend of “lust” (H3). In its quarto versions and in its folio version, Shakespeare’s King Lear utterly rejects lust: both lust as male sexual interest in women and lust as female desire. As Margreta de Grazia suggests, the play does not laugh with Gloucester at the “good sport” he found in the extramarital sexual encounter that led to the conception of his bastard son, Edmund (“Ideology” 28–30; TLN 26; 1.1.21). Gloucester has wasted his seed, the bodily equivalent of his land, and his waste precipitates the stripping of his son Edgar’s inheritance. In consequence, Gloucester loses his eyes; and even Edgar regards the loss as a fitting punishment for his father’s lecherous crime (TLN 3131–3134; 5.3.171–172).