The First Three Pages

Well, guys, it's finally coming together. And after analyzing my audiences and going through some more scholarship, I discovered just how bold my thesis needed to be to work. I was up against hundreds of years of interpretations at the expense of the blind Gloucester, so I proposed a radical new way of reading King Lear.

I think my response to Jonathan Goldberg gets a little fuzzy near the end, but you'll have to tell me what you think. Obviously, this is not a complete draft, but it was a great way for me to get the ball rolling. Bring on the feedback!

Nyssa Silvester

Dr. Gideon Burton

ENGL 382:004

23 March 2013

The Dover Cliff scene of King Lear has spent at least several decades under the puzzled scrutiny of scholars. In the midst of a tragedy, why does Shakespeare insert such a supposedly comical scene, in which a blind man is tricked into thinking he’s jumped off a cliff? With the rise of disability studies, though, this feeling of head-scratching has developed into discomfort. Gloucester’s identity as a blind man becomes important in that scene, and readers of King Lear are faced with difficult interpretive questions: what are we supposed to make of comedy at the expense of a blind man? Does Gloucester become yet another blind stereotype as he falls on level ground, tricked by a sighted man who would of course know better? In answer to these questions, I propose a radical rereading of the Dover Cliff scene, one which might present King Lear to blind studies with fewer interpretive complications: this scene need not be read as comical. Gloucester and the people around him show enough acceptance of his blindness as a lifestyle, and Gloucester shows enough awareness of Edgar’s trickery as he describes the imaginary cliffs, that this scene can be read as Gloucester fooling his sighted helper, cooperating in the charade that gives him new hope for his life ahead. With this interpretation, the discomfiting comedy falls away, as does Gloucester’s blindness as symbolic shorthand for sin or imperceptiveness.

Previous references to King Lear in the context of blind studies have been especially dismissive of the Dover Cliff scene. Kenneth Jernigan, for instance, in his clarion call for more positive representations of the blind in literature, scoffs at Shakespeare’s take on blindness in King Lear, saying, “He makes the blinded Gloucester in ‘King Lear’ so thoroughly confused and helpless that he can be persuaded of anything and deceived by any trick.” And Jernigan has right to be concerned about this interpretation. American culture generally represents blindness as a completely debilitating event even when it is mostly social stigma that makes life challenging for the blind in an age of technology (see Pierce). Blogger Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter summarizes popular treatment of blindness through her experience with a Law and Order episode in which a newly blinded man bemoans his life, in which he cannot safely move around the house or go to a restaurant by himself.# And the entire tradition of literature has not done much better about offering blind role models for readers. Oedipus, the long-lasting trope of blindness as punishment for sin, still seems to hold his symbolic power after thousands of years,and professor Georgina Kleege points out how harmful the Oedipus trope can be for the blind because the “whole point” of Oedipus is that he can’t “[get] used to the idea of his lost sight”; otherwise, his blindness as punishment would lose its effect (74). So while Shakespeare’s King Lear might get roped in to the literary tradition of making the blind merely helpless, instructive symbols, the play is easily rehabilitated. If Gloucester is not read as fooled during the Dover Cliffs scene, Shakespeare’s great tragedy could lead the way for depicting the life after blindness in classic literature that scholars like Kleege search for.

The basic way to read against the comedy at the expense of Gloucester in the Dover Cliff scene is, perhaps unsurprisingly, to focus more on how Gloucester operates in the scene. While Edgar is leading Gloucester along and falsely describing their surroundings, Gloucester periodically protests, almost impatiently, to Edgar’s words: “Methinks the ground is even” (IV.vi.3), he insists, and “Methinks you’re better spoken” (line 14). Tellingly, the scene starts not with an assertion from Edgar but from a perhaps suspicious question from Gloucester: “When shall I come to th’ top of that same hill?” (line 1). Though this opening line would seem to frame the scene almost from Gloucester’s perspective, most scholars focus so much on Edgar’s ekphrasis in his imaginary creation of cliffs that they wind up automatically dismissing Gloucester’s lines to a merely functional role. Jonathan Goldberg, for instance, implies that Gloucester’s protests to Edgars descriptions are only present to definitively establish for the audience the scene’s setting—which is not, in fact, at the Cliffs of Dover. Says Goldberg, “Still, an audience would also know that we were to witness a scene at Dover Cliff, Shakespeare’s stage would have no way of representating the event save in the language available to those onstage who could testify to such an arrival; in this scene, only Edgar could report the evidence of sight” (539). This last line of Goldberg’s analysis is particularly confusing. Though he insists that Edgar is the only reliable reporter of the scene, it should be clear to the reader or viewer that it is Gloucester, in fact, who is providing the correct topography. And if Gloucester is capable of discerning his surroundings despite Edgar’s words to the contrary, it seems inaccurate to give Edgar the privileged position as the only one who could report “the evidence of sight.” What can be seen Edgar does not report but Gloucester does. Though Goldberg’s point is received that Gloucester does not have the sight that the audience depends so much on in their own lives, Gloucester’s accurate knowledge of the situation undercuts his argument and shows its bias for the sighted at the expense of the blind. Gloucester does not need sight to perceive the same evidences that sight would deliver to him, and yet Edgar is still interpreted as the necessary viewpoint character for the audience.

Works Cited

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation: King Lear 4:6 in Perspective.” Poetics Today 5.3 (1984): 537–47.

Kuenning-Pollpeter, Bridgit. “How Blindness Is Often Depicted.” Live Well Nebraska. Live Well Nebraska, 12 January 2012. Web. 21 March 2013.

Jernigan, Kenneth. “Is Literature against Us?” Address delivered at the annual banquet of the National Federation of the Blind, Chicago, 3 July 1974.

Pierce, Barbara. “No Such Thing as Blind Culture.” Braille Monitor November 2008. Web. 21 March 2013.