Two old men, King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester (or Gloster), drive a theme with two plot-lines.  They are both now past it, and they are out of touch with the next generation – which in their case contains predators to whom they are vulnerable.  They respond by casting out the innocent child.  If Hamlet is about angry young men, King Lear is about angry old men.

Two sisters compete for nastiness.  ‘Tigers, not daughters.’  Bradley looks to give the palm to Regan – notwithstanding that Goneril murders her, and offers to give the same medicine to her own husband in order to make room in her bed for the bastard.  Bradley remarked that Regan had ‘much less force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is less formidable and more loathsome.’  Tales of evil sisters have a long history, but these too are hard to beat.  When Regan says she is sick, Goneril, the poisoner, says, aside: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’  The humour is very black and morbid at the end.  But Regan does have ‘Let him smell his way to Dover.’  And that is pure evil.  Perhaps Bradley had in mind that being weaker, and second in line, Regan was the crueller bully when she got her chance.

Two sons, and brothers of sorts, are very different.  The bastard lives up to the argot in his title.  Gloster’s legitimate son, Edgar, is very hardly done by, but he finishes in triumph, while taking out the bastard, and coming into power.

The two husbands of the evil sisters fall out almost immediately, we are told.  Cornwall is the archetypal villain.  Albany comes fully to understand his folly in marrying Goneril.  Cornwall gets his due from a servant – exquisite irony.  Albany is set to retire hurt.  He was not built for this sort of game.

Two members of the aristocracy – two nobles, if you prefer –react in their own way to events above them.  Kent is nothing if not forthright – and he is ferociously loyal.  He is the first out of the family to feel the wrath of the king in his descent into madness.  Gloster is appalled at what is happening, but he plays the role of the dutiful courtier.  But when civil war is started, he has to take sides, and he pays the ultimate price in the cruellest scene of this playwright outside of Titus Andronicus.

The two French wooers of Cordelia are very different.  Burgundy is naturally unsettled that the offer of wealth has been withdrawn by a cranky king of perfidious Albion.  (He takes the Macron view of commerce.)  France is curious and big hearted – but at the end, he picks a bad time to have an alternative engagement, and his wife is murdered.

Two victims stand out because they are effectively disinherited for no good reason – Cordelia and Edgar.  Cordelia is the victim of her father’s hot blood, and the evil of her sisters.  Edgar is the victim of the evil of his sibling, and the pompous rashness of his father.  Gloster commits what might be called the Othello mistake – he convicts a loved one without hearing from him first.  (The mechanics of the two frauds are very similar.)  By contrast, Lear puts some kind of test to his daughter, and then snaps when she refuses to play the game.  There is thus a symmetry of evil and rashness in the story of two of the principal victims.

Two characters are sacrificed because they are simply not up to it.  Neither Gloster nor Albany is set in anything like the heroic mould.  They are courtiers who make up the numbers and who become collateral damage.  Albany survives, but his interest in ruling has died, and it will be a while before he thinks of marrying again.  One such ‘interlude’ is enough.

Two characters are cracked in the head – the Fool by nature, and Poor Tom by design.  The first adds to the theatre; Poor Tom does not do that – at least for most audiences today.

Two are there to meet in a fight, like that at the OK corral – Edgar and Oswald.  And each is up for it.  But Kent was the more natural antagonist: ‘His [Oswald’s] countenance likes me not.’   On this form, he could become an honorary member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. 

(The spray that Kent gives Oswald at 2.2.14ff could excite the jealousy of the coach of Melbourne Storm.  He is justly famous for his sprays of his manly entourage.  One of the milder forms of abuse of Kent for Oswald is ‘the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’  Speaking of Melbourne Storm and rugby league – which is not the upper-class version of rugby – at their first meeting, Kent labelled Oswald ‘you base football player.’  The Everyman annotation reads: ‘a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible men.’  The football reference makes dating the action in the play even more difficult, but the analogy is now complete.  This play is about the heaviest of this playwright on the stage.  Kent on Oswald is the play’s one belly laugh, and it should be played for all it is worth – otherwise the audience, too, might go mad.)

And there is something of the mathematics of the western in the fugue of the finale – two of the black hats get taken out by two of the white hats. 

And, finally, there is also an element of Greek tragedy.  Lear, Gloster, and to some extent Albany, are cleansed and enlightened by their suffering – Bradley says ‘purified.’  Which is what members of the audience might aspire to as the curtain comes down, and they go out to face the world.

The purpose of the play is to answer the question: ‘Is man no more than this?’  For that purpose, we the audience take upon ourselves the mystery of things, ‘as if we were God’s spies.’  And the answer is that all that stands between us and the primal slime is about as strong as a Tallyho cigarette paper.  That is why the study of evil in the theatre of the grotesque of the ages in King Lear is seen as this author’s greatest work.

Shakespeare – theatre – drama.