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...
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