Poor Tom and the linguistic performance of monstrosity in King Lear

Introduction

That the role of Edgar/Poor Tom is crucial in William Shakespeare’s King Lear is a critical commonplace: scholars have long recognised that his appearance in 3.4 marks a watershed moment in both the quarto and folio editions of the play. ¹ A strikingly composite character, Edgar is riddled with overflowing meanings, and his monstrous recasting in Poor Tom’s garbs occurs within a complex construct.

In this article, I discuss Poor Tom’s monstrosity specifically as a linguistic construct. To be sure, it is difficult – if not altogether impossible – to separate words and action completely when considering any work intended for theatrical performance. What follows should therefore be conceived of as a complement rather than an alternative to previous examinations of Poor Tom’s madness and monstrosity. ²

The sense I attach to the notion of monstrosity has very little to do with supernatural attributes or aberrant deformities of the body. I shall instead use the word ‘monster’ in light of poststructuralism and deconstructionism, that is, as a liminal creature that inhabits the boundaries of society and voices a kind of otherness that can be neither defined nor classified; in other words, an entity that undermines, contravenes, and subverts a system of norms. ³

This essay closely examines the scenes in which Edgar is disguised as Poor Tom, with the aim to explore the origin, the ontology, the manifestations, and the ultimate extirpation of his monstrosity. The focus of my analysis is on the words spoken by or about Edgar/Tom. My perspective is linguistic, based on the assumption that characters on the early modern stage may be understood best as subjectivities in fieri, shaped by a language that records the modes of their perpetual construction and deconstructed in a projective tangle of words and gazes. Ultimately, my point is that Poor Tom’s monstrosity in the play can also be explained in terms of specific processes of language.

Poor Tom in the tradition of the Bedlam beggars

Edgar’s disguise as Poor Tom of Bedlam is arguably one of Shakespeare’s most significant additions to his source material for the subplot revolving around the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons, the legitimate Edgar and the bastard Edmund. This narrative draws upon sources quite unlike those employed in the story of King Lear and his three daughters. The general outline is inspired by Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Book 2, Chapter 10), where two princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, come across an old blind man, once the prince of Paphlagonia. ⁴ He is escorted in his wanderings by a younger man, who – unbeknown to the old prince – is his son Leonatus, whom the old man has enlisted in order to be led to a promontory from which he may commit suicide. The man explains to Pyrocles and Musidorus that his bastard son, Plexirtus, has hatched a plot to usurp his kingdom by turning him against the loyal Leonatus. Plexirtus has then blinded him and exiled him. With the help of Pyrocles and Musidorus, the prince and Leonatus regain their power; Leonatus is crowned, and the blind King dies out of joy and sorrow.

Despite obvious similarities, differences between Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s versions of the story are remarkable – starting with the fact that, unlike Edgar in King Lear, Leonatus immediately reveals himself to his father. In addition, unlike Edmund, Plexirtus is responsible for Gloucester’s blinding and takes delight in his misery. Yet, the most telling addition to the source text is arguably the disguise Edgar takes on in King Lear to escape the pursuit of his father and brother. While the disguise is meant chiefly as a protective – and as such, somewhat passive – device, the stage persona of Poor Tom develops over a considerable number of lines and contributes significantly to the events in the second half of the play, as attested by the eponymous title in the quarto edition:

M. William Shak-speare:

HIS

True Chronicle Historie of the life and

death of King LEAR and his three

Daughters.

With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne

and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his

sullen and assumed humor of

TOM of Bedlam ⁵ :

Although central to the plot, Edmund and Albany are not mentioned; Lear’s daughters remain an anonymous collective entity; and Gloucester is only quoted in relation to Edgar. Poor Tom – who only appears in three scenes throughout the play – is instead foregrounded in the paratext as an important and autonomous character. One could argue that he is merely a spirit, or possibly a humour, issued from Edgar. However, he seems invested here with a crucial and altogether self-contained role.

Tom first appears in the middle of the play, after Edgar resolves to flee and disguise himself (2.2), because his father – deceived by Edmund – has disowned and banished him (1.2). As is often the case with early modern characters donning someone else’s garments, Edgar reveals the details of the persona he is going to perform in a famous soliloquy to the audience:

Edgar.  I heard myself proclaimed,

And by the happy hollow of a tree

Escaped the hunt. […]

While I may scape

I will preserve myself, and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury in contempt of man

Brought near to beast. (2.2.172–80)

So why this disguise? Why did Shakespeare choose Poor Tom of Bedlam instead of another, more generic disguise? As has often been noted, Poor Tom is in effect not simply a mere low-born madman but bears an explicit reference to a widely popular figure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural imagery: the Bedlamite or Bedlam beggar. ⁷ ‘Poor Toms’, ‘Toms of Bedlam’, or ‘Abraham men’ as they were also known, these individuals were escaped or released inmates from Bedlam Hospital in London, the main institution in England for the confinement of the insane since the 15th century. ⁸ They appeared in many contemporary accounts as mad and pitiful vagrants who wandered the lanes begging, ‘supposedly singing Bedlamite Ballads that told mad tales and perpetuated the Bedlam myth’. ⁹ They were regarded as disgusting figures confined to the margins of society, whose naked and self-mutilated bodies, rolling eyes, and clanking chains constituted the palpable signs of their abasement and penury.

As Michael MacDonald argues, Bedlam Hospital was ‘the longest running show in London’. ¹⁰ Inmates were often made part of a popular Victorian freak show: Bedlamite madmen were ‘another form of popular entertainment, culturally equivalent to various urban curiosities or to such theatricalised spectacles as bear-baiting or “stage plays”’. ¹¹ They were commonly associated with theft and fraud, and – as prototypes of the con man – were frequently accused of feigned madness, for which reason they were more often feared and fled than pitied. Given the early modern English fascination with madness, ¹² it comes as no surprise that the social stereotype of Poor Tom of Bedlam should appeal to playgoers and readers and appear in several plays and literary works, as well as in medical treatises and pamphlets from the mid-16th century onwards. ¹³ Even more relevant to our purpose, a popular ballad about an insane beggar called Poor Tom of Bedlam was circulating in different versions by the time Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1605–1606. ¹⁴

Edgar closely follows the tradition of the Bedlam beggars, when he turns himself into Poor Tom:

Edgar.  […] My face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes and mills,

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,

Enforce their charity. (2.2.180–91)

By giving prominence only to the pitiful, contemptuous, and disturbing elements of such a multifaceted figure, Edgar’s disguise as Poor mad Tom goes beyond the stereotype it epitomises: the Bedlam beggars were a ‘complex emblem of suffering, poverty, displacement and counterfeiting’, ¹⁵ but as highly recognisable and codified figures, they provided safe boundaries within which to confine the Bedlamites’ otherwise exceeding disruptiveness. On the contrary, Edgar/Tom’s disruptiveness knows no boundaries and does not fit in any ready-made paradigm. By resisting categorisation, Tom becomes somebody that both characters onstage and the audience experience as a monstrous ‘other’. While sticking to the codified patterns of madness and penury commonly associated with Bedlam beggars, Shakespeare simultaneously shapes Tom as a multi-layered picture mingling bestiality and humanity, lunacy and popular wisdom, demonic possession and fiendish qualities. As a result, Edgar/Tom is perceived as a monster, insofar as he incarnates everything that is antithetical to order, a violation of the ‘juridico-biological’ laws. ¹⁶

Nonetheless, if we consider the versions we have inherited of what might have been Shakespeare’s original text, Poor Tom’s monstrosity is not primarily linked to his outward appearance, to his apparel, or to what he does, since these dimensions are certainly there as central part of a theatrical performance but are mostly unspecified and less pervasive than Tom’s monstrous speeches. Monstrosity in this case, in fact, issues especially from what Tom says. For this reason, what I would like to argue is that Edgar’s performance of monstrosity in the shape of Poor Tom may be perceived as a performance relying on his language, and that Tom as a monster thereby exists in the play first and foremost as created by and made of words spoken onstage.

Preparing for Poor Tom

The image of Tom of Bedlam actually seems to be conjured up in the play even before Edgar declares his intention to take on a disguise in Act 2, namely, during Edmund’s musing over the difference between legitimate and illegitimate children. According to him, what is required of a legitimate son are just basic qualities concerning the body and the mind:

Edmund.  […] Why bastard? Wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous and my shape as true

As honest madam’s issue? […]

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth within a dull stale tired bed

Go to the creating of a whole tribe of fops

Got ’tween a sleep and wake. (1.2.6–9, 11–15)

Gloucester’s beloved Edgar instantly becomes a monster to him, an abnormal creature who has contravened the laws of nature by betraying his own father. Monstrosity here – as in the case of both Lear and his daughters – germinates from the sudden passage from natural to unnatural behaviour, from known to unknown, from gratitude to ingratitude, from filial love to a traitor’s loathing; more importantly, it springs up as an abrupt and unforeseen transformation. Moreover, all of the adjectives whereby Gloucester inveighs against Edgar’s alleged betrayal seem to prepare not so much for a monstrous creature in general as for Poor Tom in particular: the adjectives employed by Gloucester prefigure Tom as somebody ‘abhorred’, ‘detested’, and ‘abominable’, as somebody regarded with disgust, disliked, held in abhorrence. Edgar is also twice called ‘brutish’, which again applies perfectly to his alter ego, mad Tom, insofar as he is ‘the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury in contempt of man / Brought near to beast’ (2.2.178–80), and a ‘poor, / bare, forked animal’ (3.4.105–6) – as Lear later defines him – living in a state of utter degradation. His father’s words thus seem to project onstage the image of Tom before it is even devised by Edgar, his ultimate creator.

It is even more so with the polysemous word ‘unnatural’, which encompasses all of Tom’s characteristics: in OED, ‘unnatural’ means ‘not in accordance or conformity with the normal physical nature of humans or animals […] (a1400)’ (A.1), which is appropriate for Tom as a creature whose nature in the perceptions of others lingers between the human and the animal realms though not strictly belonging to either. ‘Unnatural’ is also defined by OED as ‘lacking normal human feelings or sympathies […] (1473)’ (2.a), and ‘physically abnormal or malformed […]. Mentally deficient or retarded (obs.) (1516)’ (3.b); this calls to mind the inability to establish emotional bonds or affective relations, deformity and intellectual disabilities, which are Poor Tom’s most prominent characteristics. But, OED also defines ‘unnatural’ as ‘illegitimate; […] (1554)’ (4), and ‘at variance with what is normal, usual, or to be expected; […] (a1586)’ (5), hence already prefiguring Tom as the inhabitant of an uncivilised, extraordinary world with no rules and no memory of its past.

Once Edgar gives shape to what was hinted at by his father’s words, he will no longer be himself; as we shall see, he will no longer be Edgar from the moment he delivers Poor Tom through language, up to the moment his own voice erases any traces of Tom’s monstrosity, thereby enabling him to recover his own lost identity.

The linguistic birth of Poor Tom

Poor Tom’s first appearance onstage in Act 3 comes remarkably late, if one considers that he had been first evoked in 1.2 and that Edgar had revealed his intentions in 2.2. In light of a number of oblique echoes of childbirths, ¹⁷ this temporal hiatus may be viewed as a gestation, a long interim during which ‘all germens spill at once’ (3.2.8) and announce the coming of monster-Tom.

As we have seen, before being properly ‘delivered’ in the middle of the play, Poor Tom is first conceived by Edgar in the soliloquy quoted above (2.2.172–92), in which he discloses to the audience his plan to take on a disguise in order to escape his father and brother’s hunt. As Peter Hyland remarks, this was a highly popular theatrical device at the time, since

playwrights were anxious to ensure that the audience was always aware that a character was in disguise. Sometimes a disguise is put onstage; sometimes […] a character is given a soliloquy to inform the spectators of what he has done. ¹⁸

Birth imagery is immediately suggested by the fact that, while designing his own scenario, Edgar hides in the ‘happy hollow of a tree’ (2.2.173), a safe and concave shelter where he can go unnoticed, and from which he will re-emerge as Poor Tom. This ‘happy hollow’ in which Tom is conceived and from which he is delivered may symbolise a motherly womb, the ultimate shelter for any living creature. Edgar’s secret abode is the place where he both conceives and plasters Tom as his parental figure. According to Simon Palfrey, it is ‘part of the landscape and […] a gap or fold within this landscape, a pocket in space-time where abeyance is. […] Suspension outside time, but equally a place of hushed and furious gestation’. ¹⁹ Edgar’s ‘happy hollow’, as the space where monstrosity is envisioned and engendered, is – just like a mother’s womb according to early modern theories on the maternal body – a warm and welcoming cradle, and at the same time a scary, mysterious, and dark place. ²⁰

What surfaces from this ‘happy hollow’ is a creature whose ‘presented nakedness’ will ‘outface the winds and persecutions of the sky’ (2.2.182–3). Nakedness – the original, helpless, and most authentic condition of anyone at the moment of birth – is here ‘presented’, offered, and actively delivered to the world; in other words, it is made present and brought into the presence of playgoers as in a birth chamber.

In this respect, the verb ‘outface’ is also meaningful, insofar as – in addition to defiance – it literally points to a movement out from the hollow-womb to the world, from the inside to the outside, thereby conveying the idea of a pure essence in potentia, of a coming to life during childbirth. It also semantically resonates with the peculiar choice of the past participle ‘presented’, for, in early modern times, ‘to present’ was employed in obstetrical contexts with the specific – though rare – meaning ‘to direct (a particular part [of a foetus]) towards the cervix during labour’ (OED, 8.b, since 1598).

Perhaps even more importantly, this self-fashioning metamorphoses Edgar: from somebody passively subjected to his brother’s slanders and his father’s iniquitous punishments to an active agent. That is why his soliloquy heavily revolves around a sharp predominance of active verbs denoting material processes in the future tense and of modal verbs of volition in the first person:

Edgar.  […] While I may scape

I will preserve myself, and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury in contempt of man

Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky. (2.2.176–83, my emphasis)

Metaphorically speaking, Edgar is the only parent Poor Tom has. When Tom eventually comes into the world in Act 3, though, Edgar is somehow assisted by Lear as his midwife, inasmuch as it is the voice of the old king – Tom’s companion in madness and delirium – that delivers Poor Tom in Lear’s well-known cathartic prayer just a few lines before Tom’s entry onstage:

Lear.Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just. (3.4.28–36)

As a monster, Tom questions inherited values and undermines received dichotomies. Accordingly, he is perceived as dreadful and repulsive. He endlessly oscillates between the poles of object and subject, human and inhuman, name and anonymity, noun and verb, being and making, creaturely and transcendental, phenomenal and noumenal. He is a human being, an animal, a beast, a spirit, a demon; a beggar, a madman, a disguise, a performance, a role, an actor. Tom seems to exist between body and voice: on one hand, Edgar’s soliloquy (2.2) relies on physicality taken to extremes, and its emphasis falls upon what he will do to and with his own body, upon how he will look like and upon the mutations he will undergo. On the other hand, though, Tom is – more than anything else – a pure, free-floating, loose voice disjointed from that very body. As a matter of fact, the folio text records his first appearance as a bodiless voice from within even before Edgar’s final, long-awaited entry onto the scene ‘disguised as Poor Tom’ (S.D., 3.4.44–5):

Edgar [within]. Fathom and half, fathom and half: Poor

Tom!

Foo. Come not in here, nuncle, here’s a spirit. Help me,

Help me!

Kent. Give me thy hand. Who’s there?

Fool. A spirit, a spirit. He says his name’s Poor Tom.

Kent. What art thou that dost grumble there i’the straw?

Come forth. (3.4.37–44, my emphasis; lines 37–8 not included in the quarto text)

That the monster engendered by Edgar and delivered by Lear should be regarded as part of Edgar himself is, of course, a truism. Poor Tom is after all a disguise with whom the audience is acquainted, a veneer of fiction beneath which the character of Edgar still lies. Yet, despite the conventionality of such a device, there is much more to this connection between Edgar and Poor Tom, a connection certainly riddled with multiple psychoanalytic implications. Tom is not only a part of or played by his owner/interpreter, but he embodies the instinctual part his owner/interpreter had to repress and silence in order to fulfil his duty as the legitimate son and rightful heir to the Earl of Gloucester, in order to become the epitome of law, justice, and order.

Ultimately, what leads Poor Tom is not reason, nor is he inscribed in any social order – whether it be ancient Britain or early modern England. Rather, his very existence ends up disrupting these social constructions and hierarchies, and raises uneasy questions over their ideological and transitory nature: in the post-storm scene (3.4), Poor Tom is endowed with the right to speak only because he shares the stage with Lear – who has lost his reason too, together with all of his powers and possessions – and because the scene is set far away from castles and palaces, outside the borders of civilisation. Here on the heath, raving Tom sets Edgar’s self free from the restraints of his father’s house and laws, and thus comes to embody his bestial side, reduced to pure instincts – ‘the basest and most poorest shape / […] near to beast’ (2.2.178, 180). Mad Lear’s address to Tom as a human being debased to the condition of a beast or of a thing is telling in this respect, for it invariably sets him apart from the rest of the characters onstage:

Lear.  What hast thou been?

[…]

Why, thou wert better in a grave than to answer

with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou

ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep

no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? Here’s three on’s

us are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself.

Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor,

bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.82, 99–106)

The voice(s) of Poor Tom

For both Tom and Lear’s daughters monstrosity is shapeless. It does not come from physical deformities or supernatural attributes as in the case of the monstrous creatures represented in contemporary literary works, travel accounts, and wonder books. What, however, tells Edgar/Tom’s monstrosity apart from Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia’s is the fact that the former is less the product of a sudden and irreversible transformation than a slow germination taking place over the course of three acts. It is true that, having challenged paternal authority, Lear’s daughters also suffer their father’s wild wrath and are immediately labelled as monstrous fiends and beastly creatures, in words that remind us of what happens after Gloucester reads Edgar’s alleged letter. ²³ But the two plights are starkly different since Edgar chooses to take on his monstrous disguise, while Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia have no choice but to be turned into monsters by someone else, as they are ‘monstered’ by Lear’s will and words. ²⁴ Lear’s biased gaze on his daughters, especially Goneril and Regan, becomes the only perspective available to the audience, so much so that they eventually do become the monsters Lear’s curses have summoned. In their case, amorphous monstrosity irreversibly turns into ‘proper deformity’ (4.2.61).

Conversely, Edgar’s monstrosity always emerges as partial and transitory, fully dependant on the mutable, diverging perspectives and words of his interlocutors. So for instance, if we compare Lear's attitude with Gloucester’s outburst of anger in Act 1, the Earl’s evolving attitude towards his son’s supposed unnatural behaviour bears witness to the impermanence of Edgar’s – and of Poor Tom’s – monstrosity:

Gloucester [to Kent]. I had a son,

Now outlawed from my blood; he sought my life,

But lately, very late. I loved him, friend,

No father his son dearer. True to tell thee,

The grief hath crazed my wits. (3.4.162–6)

What is monstrous are in fact Poor Tom’s illogical speeches. They either describe the brute ways in which he provides for his own basic needs and the person he was before being reduced to begging, or they tell Tom’s personal audience – Lear, Kent, the Fool, and Gloucester – about the demons that, he claims, possess him and unflaggingly try to persuade him to commit suicide, as in the following example:

Edgar [as Poor Tom]. Who gives anything to Poor Tom? Whom the foul

fiend hath led through fire and through flame,

through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire;

that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his

pew; set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud of

heart, to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inched

bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor.

[…]

Do Poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes.

There could I have him now, and there, and there

again, and there. (3.4.50–6, 59–61)

Another aspect contributing to making Poor Tom’s language monstrous is the specific imagery it incessantly calls forth. It has repeatedly been noticed that, when he describes his devils, Tom does not generically refer to the demonological beliefs of the time, but hints more precisely at the exorcist practices against alleged demons described in Samuel Harsnett’s popular treatise A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. As Stephen Greenblatt famously observed, ‘Shakespeare in King Lear stages not only exorcism, but Harsnett on exorcism’. ²⁷ Shakespeare does indeed borrow from Harsnett the general outline of his storm scenes, the style and tones of his accounts of exorcisms, a number of ‘colorful adjectives’, ²⁸ some details of Lear’s madness, the simulated demonic possession of Edgar/Tom, and the whole array of devils plaguing Poor Tom:

Edgar [as Poor Tom]. This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins

at curfew and walks till the first cock; he gives the web

and the pin, squinies the eye and makes the harelip;

mildews the white wheat and hurts the poor creature of

earth.

[…]

Beware my follower. Peace Smulkin, peace, thou

fiend. […]

The prince of darkness is a gentleman. Modo

he’s called, and Mahu.

[…]

The foul fiend haunts Poor Tom in the voice of a

nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two

white herring. Croak not, black angel, I have no food for

thee. (3.4.112–6, 136–40; 3.6.29–32, quarto; my emphasis) ²⁹

In addition to its imagery and borrowings, Poor Tom’s language is monstrous because of Tom’s deranged syntax, the lack of logical connectives in his sentences, and the utmost fragmentation of his speech. His alienated words imply disorderly shape and sound even more disjointed when Gloucester arrives on the heath looking for the banished Lear (from 3.4.112), since mad speech sounds as the ideal disguise in order not to be recognised by his own father. Applying to this text what Foucault famously wrote in his seminal study on madness – ‘language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form’ ³³ – one may argue that it is in language that Poor Tom’s madness and monstrosity are made available.

Tom’s mad speech is indeed characterised by ‘fragmentation, obsession, and repetition’, ³⁴ and – as mentioned above – it is contaminated by other discourses that he borrows and mingles with no apparent logical coherence: as is the case with madmen, Poor Tom’s discourse is never his own, it is spoken by voices that do not belong to him. Even the only proper monsters mentioned in the play – hallucinatory as they may be – are manifestly linguistic: the unrelenting ‘foul fiend’ and the other devils that possess him are just voices in Tom’s head, endlessly talking and suggesting ways in which he should commit suicide. ³⁵ Poor Tom never seems to be seeing his supernatural harassers, but only to be hearing them speak: his monsters are voices.

Poor Tom’s shattered – in both contents and formulation – voice also reflects the fragmentation of his self. From Tom’s birth in Act 2 on (‘Poor Tom, / That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am’ (2.2.191–2)), the main cause of Edgar’s split subjectivity lies in his own words: in 2.2 Edgar’s soliloquy delivers Poor Tom, and, towards the end of the play, Tom becomes the very ‘foul fiend’ by which he claims to be possessed. This occurs when Edgar, after taking off his monstrous disguise and donning peasant's clothing in the charade of Gloucester's mock suicide, pretends to have seen a devilish creature beside Gloucester at the top of Dover cliff that was urging him to jump. The cosmological monster here described recalls both Edgar himself disguised as Poor Tom and – at the same time – Tom’s horrid ‘foul fiend’:

Edgar.   As I stood here below methought his eyes

Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses,

Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea.

It was some fiend. […]

Gloucester.  I do remember now. […]

[…] That thing you speak of,

I took it for a man. Often ’twould say

‘The fiend, the fiend’; he led me to that place. (4.6.69–72, 75, 77–9)

In order for Edgar fully to recover, Poor Tom needs to be sent away. That is why, after having taken centre stage for a conspicuous number of lines, by the end of Act 3 Tom simply disappears in a way that recalls the almost concomitant disappearance of the Fool (after 3.6). Edgar gets rid of him and, by doing so, he regains the control of his language from the abysses of his alter ego’s disjointed insane speech and recovers a coherent and logical argumentation in a famous soliloquy only found in the quarto text:

Edgar. How light and portable my pain seems now,

When that which makes me bend makes the King bow,

He childed as I fathered. Tom, away;

Mark the high noises, and thyself bewray

When false opinion, whose wrong thoughts defile thee,

In thy just proof repeals and reconciles thee.

What will hap more tonight, safe ’scape the King.

Lurk, lurk! (3.6.105–12)

Edgar confesses to having escaped by wearing ‘a madman’s rags’ (5.3.186), having met and led blind Gloucester and having witnessed his father’s death after his own denouement. The final restoration of his self and language brings Edgar back to the place where he belongs. That is why, in the folio edition, the famed final soliloquy, delivered by the Duke of Albany in the quarto, (5.3.322–5) is his own.

Conclusion

In King Lear, the addition of the role of Poor Tom to Shakespeare’s source material is an explicit reference to the Bedlam beggars’ popular tradition of the time. Albeit deeply imbued with this tradition, Edgar’s disguise as Tom in the play nonetheless goes beyond this stereotyped character and thus stages a kind of otherness that cannot be categorised or contained.

As I have argued in this article, Tom’s monstrosity appears to derive not so much from his outward looks or actions as from words spoken by and about him. This monstrosity strikes as mainly linguistic, insofar as the creation of monster-Tom is anticipated by Edmund’s and Gloucester’s speeches (1.2) before he is finally conceived and delivered by Edgar in his soliloquy (2.2), which is strewn with birth imagery.

The monster thus forged is riddled with antitheses – human/beastly, earthy/demonic, active/passive, body/voice – and therefore defies the taming of definition. As a role to be performed, Poor Tom’s monstrosity relies on transitory perspectives and issues from Edgar’s composite tangle of voices that by mingling produce the sense of a Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Such linguistic monstrosity is displayed in Tom’s nonsensical language combining different sources and registers, in his deranged syntax, and in features pertaining to the early modern representations of beggary and madness. It also comes in the shape of the monstrous voices of the demons haunting Tom and of several references to the contemporary exorcism debate, which accordingly discloses monstrosities related to religious persecutions, to methods for the containment of ‘alterity’, and to the cultural imagery of the demonic.

Tom’s fragmented language reflects the disintegration of Edgar’s identity, which thus shines forth as the prototype of the identities summoned for representation on the early modern stage. An enmeshed bundle of voices that overlap and often blend, Edgar’s subjectivity is as fluttering and vagrant as the monstrous character he brings to life through discourse, in the folds of which his role is continually re-appropriated and re-written.