Blindness in King Lear Essay

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Blindness in King Lear

In William Shakespeare's play King Lear, common notions of sight and blindness are complicated and subverted the story of the Earl of Gloucester, who has his eyes gouged out following his betrayal at the hands of his illegitimate son Edmund. When he is able to physically see, Gloucester is blinded by the machinations of Edmund, Goneril, and Regan, and it is only when he is blinded does he come to understand the reality of the situation. By examining the first scene of Edmund's scheming against Gloucester and Edgar, Cornwall's gouging of Gloucester's eyes, and Gloucester's eventual death at the climax of the play, one may see how the play warns against the illusory nature of appearances and the unreliability of sight, a warning made implicitly in the central plot through Goneril and Regan's false proclamations of love for Lear but demonstrated explicitly in the parallel story of Gloucester and his sons.

The centrality of sight and blindness in Gloucester's story comes when Edmund forges a letter supposedly in Edgar's handwriting professing a desire to murder Gloucester and divide his property. Edmund plays at hiding the letter from Gloucester in order to appear reluctant to incriminate his brother Edgar, but Gloucester insists on seeing it, telling Edmund "Let's see: come / if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles" (1.2.34-5). Thus, Gloucester reveals his weakness by insinuating that truth, or at least information worth knowing, is centrally obtained through sight.

Edmund uses this to his advantage by playing on Gloucester's reliance on vision as the primary means of understanding when he tells Gloucester that he finds the letter "not / fit for your o'er looking," which is precisely the kind of thing that would pique Gloucester's interest such that he finally just says "Let's see, let's see," and Edmund finally shows him the letter (1.2.38-9, 43).

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Of course, Gloucester's reliance on sight is immediately shown to be useless, as he is unable to tell that the letter is a forgery and must rely on Edmund to determine whether or not it is actually written in Edgar's handwriting (1.2.64). Even the subsequent contrasting conceptions of Nature expressed by Gloucester and Edmund reveal Gloucester's weakness for vision, because he believes the obscuration of light in the form of lunar and solar eclipses are the cause of the recent treachery and injustice seen in the play (1.2.106-7).

Ironically, Gloucester's overreliance on sight leads to his blinding; his utter credulity regarding Edmund's forgery and performances leads him straight into the hands of Regan and Cornwall. However, this scene also foreshadows Gloucester's eventual triumph, because although he is physically blinded this scene marks the beginning of Gloucester truly "seeing" the truth, and when considered alongside a later scene demonstrates Gloucester's evolution from one who favors sight but is blind to the truth to a character who is physically blind but blessed with the light of truth (another of the paradoxical dichotomies in the play, such as the Fool's wisdom or Lear's reasonable madness).

With the reality of Regan and Cornwall's treachery revealed to him, Gloucester states that….....

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