Reading and Literature Studies · Reading Literary TextsKing Lear, Part 2: Acts 2 and 3: The Storm, the Fool, Poor Tom and the Language of Madness
2.1 2.3 1.4About 75 minutes
Learning goals- I can explain how the conventions of Shakespearean tragedy (double plot, verse and prose, disguise, the Fool) shape Acts 2 and 3.
- I can analyse the storm as pathetic fallacy and as a turning point for Lear.
- I can analyse elements of style in Lear's speeches: imperative verbs, imagery, repetition and the shift from verse to prose.
- I can make inferences about Lear's changing understanding of himself and others.
Words to know
pathetic fallacy
Giving human feelings to nature, often so that weather or landscape mirrors a character's state.
disguise (as convention)
A character hiding their identity; in Lear, Kent and Edgar both disguise themselves to stay close to the people who wronged them.
Poor Tom
The mad beggar Edgar pretends to be; Tom o' Bedlam was a common name for beggars who were, or pretended to be, mentally ill.
the Fool
A professional jester allowed to tell truths to a king in the form of jokes, songs and riddles.
imperative
A verb form that gives a command: Blow! Rage! Spout!
prose
Ordinary, unmetred language; in Shakespeare often used by servants, fools, letters and characters in madness.
anagnorisis
A moment of recognition or discovery in a tragedy (from Aristotle).
Hook: a king against the weather
Picture an old man on a bare heath at night, soaked through, shouting orders at a thunderstorm. A few hours ago he had a hundred knights. Now he has a loyal servant in disguise, a joking Fool, and soon a naked beggar who seems to be mad. This is the most famous scene in King Lear, and one of the most famous in all theatre. In Acts 2 and 3 Lear loses everything he thought made him a king. In the storm, he begins to discover what a human being is.
Remember from Grade 11
In Hamlet you studied madness (real or performed), soliloquies, the shift between verse and prose, and the play within the play. Lear has two kinds of madness side by side: Lear's real breakdown and Edgar's performed madness as Poor Tom, with the Fool's wise nonsense between them.
Acts 2 and 3 in brief
Act 2. Edmund tricks Edgar into running away, then wounds himself and claims Edgar attacked him; Gloucester believes it. Edgar, now hunted, disguises himself as Poor Tom, a mad beggar, and says that as himself he is nothing. Kent, still disguised, quarrels with Goneril's steward Oswald, and Cornwall puts him in the stocks, an insult to the king he serves. Lear arrives at Gloucester's castle and finds Regan as cold as Goneril. Together the sisters bargain his knights down to none. Lear's answer begins O, reason not the need!: even the poorest beggar has something more than bare need. Refusing to weep, he goes out into the rising storm, and the doors are shut behind him.
Act 3. On the heath, Lear defies the storm. Kent leads him toward a hovel. Inside they find Poor Tom. Lear, seeing a man with nothing, tears at his own clothes. Meanwhile, Gloucester secretly decides to help the king and tells Edmund, who betrays him to Cornwall. In scene 7, Cornwall and Regan punish Gloucester with terrible violence: they blind him. A servant tries to stop it and wounds Cornwall. Gloucester learns that Edmund betrayed him and that Edgar was innocent, and he is thrown out of his own house. (The scene is shocking on stage; this lesson does not describe it in detail.)
The storm: style and meaning
Lear's first storm speech begins with commands:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Style: a run of imperative verbs (Blow, crack, rage, spout) and huge, noisy words (cataracts = waterfalls or floodgates of the sky; hurricanoes = a grand form of hurricanes, here waterspouts). Lear still speaks like a king giving orders, but he is giving them to weather that cannot obey. The style itself shows his powerlessness.
Moments later he says something different:
I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.
The king calls himself simply a man. It is self-pitying, but it is also the first step toward seeing himself as one human being among others.
Worked exampleLet's analyse a turning point
In 3.4, before entering the hovel, Lear prays for the first time for other people. He begins Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, asks how the homeless and hungry can survive such nights, and says O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this! Analyse the change.
- Paraphrase: You poor, ragged people, wherever you are, enduring this merciless storm: how do your homeless heads and starving bodies survive? I have paid too little attention to this.
- Sound: the alliteration of pelting... pitiless makes the storm's blows audible.
- Insight: for the first time Lear thinks about his subjects as suffering people, and he takes responsibility as a former king (I have ta'en too little care).
- Context of the scene: he speaks this just before meeting Poor Tom, who embodies the poor naked wretch. The play arranges the meeting to test his new understanding.
- Inference: Lear's suffering has given him compassion that his power never did. The storm is a punishment, and an education.
In 3.4 Lear turns from his own wrongs to the suffering of the poor, admitting his neglect as king: suffering produces the compassion that power prevented.
An interpretation of Lear's journey, not data: as he loses power and status (solid line), he gains self-knowledge and compassion (dashed line). The lines cross in the storm. Many critics read the tragedy this way; Lesson 14 looks at readings that disagree.Three kinds of wisdom in madness
- The Fool speaks in riddles, songs and jokes, mostly in prose or rhyme. He tells Lear the truth no one else will: that he gave away his power and made his daughters his mothers. The Fool disappears after Act 3, and the play never explains where he goes.
- Poor Tom (Edgar in disguise) speaks wild, broken prose about devils and cold. He is performing madness to survive. To Lear he becomes the image of humanity stripped bare: Lear calls him the thing itself, a poor, bare, forked animal.
- Lear moves from verse (the language of kings) toward prose and fragments as his mind breaks. In a mock trial (in the Quarto text), he puts a stool on trial as if it were Goneril.
The convention of the wise fool turns the world upside down: the Fool and the madmen see more clearly than the sane, powerful characters. In this play, it is the people with nothing who understand.
Worked exampleLet's read form as meaning
Why does Shakespeare place real madness (Lear), feigned madness (Edgar) and professional folly (the Fool) together in the hovel scene?
- Form: three characters, three kinds of unreason, on one stage: a deliberate dramatic pattern.
- Contrast: the Fool's folly is a job (licensed truth-telling); Edgar's madness is a disguise (a survival strategy); Lear's madness is real (a mind breaking under grief).
- Effect: the scene asks the audience to compare them. Who is truly mad: the old man in the storm, or the daughters who shut the doors?
- Language: none of them speaks the smooth, ceremonial verse of Act 1, scene 1. That verse belonged to the flatterers. Truth now comes in rags, riddles and fragments.
The hovel scene uses a pattern of three madnesses to invert the play's values: the ceremonial language of power has been exposed as false, and the fragmented speech of the outcasts carries the truth.
Just for funKing Lear may be the only character in literature who tries to solve his family problems by shouting at the weather. To be fair to the weather, it shouted back.
Hands-on activityStorm soundscape and speech
You need: a quiet room, household objects to make storm sounds (a baking sheet to wobble for thunder, a box of dry rice or lentils to shake for rain, your own voice for wind), a phone or other device to record, and a copy of 3.2.
- With another person, create a 30-second storm soundscape using the objects.
- Read Lear's opening lines in 3.2 aloud over the soundscape. Try it three ways: as a king commanding, as an old man pleading, as a man laughing at his own powerlessness.
- Record each version and listen back.
- Write a paragraph: Which reading best fits Lear at this moment, and what evidence from the words supports it?
Safety note: keep it to shaking and tapping; no water, fire or electrical devices near water.
What to look for: three genuinely different readings, a clear choice, and evidence such as the imperatives (Blow, crack, rage) or the later self-description a man / More sinned against than sinning.
Your turn
1How do Goneril and Regan reduce Lear's followers in Act 2?
They bargain him down from 100 knights to 50, 25, 10, 5, 1, and finally none (What need one?), stripping away his followers and his royal identity.
2Paraphrase the idea behind O, reason not the need!
Don't argue about what I need: even the poorest beggar has more than the bare minimum; if humans had only what they needed to survive, their lives would be no better than animals'.
3What is pathetic fallacy, and how is the storm an example?
Giving human feelings to nature so that it mirrors a character. The violent storm mirrors the chaos in Lear's mind, his family and the kingdom.
4What do the imperative verbs in Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! show about Lear?
He still speaks like a king giving orders, but he is commanding weather that cannot obey: his language shows both his royal habit and his powerlessness.
5What changes in Lear's Poor naked wretches speech?
For the first time he feels compassion for the poor and admits that as king he took too little care of them.
6Who is Poor Tom, and why does he pretend to be mad?
Edgar in disguise; he is being hunted after Edmund's lie, and a mad beggar is invisible and safe.
7Why is it significant that Lear calls Poor Tom the thing itself?
He sees in Tom humanity stripped of everything (clothes, rank, possessions): the basic human being, a poor, bare, forked animal. It makes Lear question what he himself is without his crown.
More practice: warm-up
1Who puts Kent in the stocks?
Cornwall (with Regan's support).
2What disguise does Edgar take?
Poor Tom, a mad beggar (Tom o' Bedlam).
3Where does Lear go when the sisters shut him out?
Out onto the heath in the storm.
4What happens to Gloucester in 3.7?
Cornwall and Regan blind him and throw him out.
5What is a Fool in Shakespeare's plays?
A professional jester allowed to tell truths through jokes, songs and riddles.
More practice: on your own
1Explain why Kent being put in the stocks is an insult to Lear.
Kent is Lear's messenger and servant; punishing him publicly treats the king's authority with contempt. Lear can hardly believe his daughter and son-in-law would do it: it shows how completely his power has gone.
2Why does the play place Gloucester's blinding right after the storm scenes?
It moves the cruelty from words to the body; the subplot now mirrors the main plot in a physical way (Lear loses his mind, Gloucester his eyes). It also shows how far Regan and Cornwall will go once there is no king to restrain them.
3What is the irony of Gloucester's blindness?
When he could see, he could not see the truth about his sons; once blinded, he learns that Edmund betrayed him and Edgar was innocent. Insight comes only with loss of sight.
4Why might the Fool disappear after Act 3?
Possible answers: his role (telling Lear the truth) is done once Lear sees for himself; in some productions the same actor played Cordelia, who returns in Act 4; his last line is a riddling joke. The play never explains, which adds to its bleakness.
5Inference: what does Lear's tearing off his clothes in 3.4 show?
He wants to become like Poor Tom, the thing itself: to strip away the false trappings of rank and find what a human being really is. It shows both his breaking mind and a new, painful insight.
Challenge
1Analyse how the shift from verse to prose in Acts 2 and 3 reflects the play's themes.
Act 1's ceremonial verse belonged to the court and to flattery. As Lear loses power and sanity, the language around him becomes prose, rhyme, songs and fragments (the Fool, Poor Tom, Lear in madness). The form shows that the ordered language of authority was hollow, and that truth now speaks in broken, humble forms, matching the theme that wisdom comes through loss.
2Write a thesis about the storm as a turning point.
Model: In Act 3 of King Lear, Shakespeare turns the storm into both a mirror of chaos and a school of suffering: stripped of shelter and followers, Lear stops commanding the elements and begins to pity the poor, so that the play's moment of greatest destruction is also the beginning of his moral recognition.
3The mock trial of Goneril (a stool) appears only in the Quarto, and the Fool's last riddling line only in the Folio. How does the existence of two texts affect how you write about Act 3?
You must say which text or edition you are using, and you cannot treat every scene as certain. An interpretation that depends on the mock trial should note it is a Quarto passage. It also shows that the play we read is partly an editorial construction, which is useful evidence for arguments about how meaning is made by editors and productions (Lesson 14).
Quiz
1. How many knights do the sisters finally allow Lear?
2. The storm mirroring Lear's mind is an example of...
4. In Poor naked wretches, Lear for the first time...
What this lesson teaches: ENG4U Reading 2.1 (text forms: conventions of Shakespearean tragedy such as the double plot, disguise, the Fool, and verse and prose), 2.3 (elements of style: imperatives, imagery, alliteration and repetition) and 1.4 (making inferences about a character's development).
Content note: Act 3, scene 7 includes the blinding of Gloucester, one of the most violent scenes in Shakespeare. The lesson refers to it without detail; filmed productions vary in how much they show, so preview them.
How to help at home:
- Do the storm soundscape together; it is fun and makes the language physical.
- Ask: Who in Act 3 is truly mad, and who only seems so?
Common difficulties:
- Treating madness scenes as nonsense to skip. The Fool's and Poor Tom's lines are full of meaning; paraphrase a few with your teen.
- Confusing scene numbers. Some editions call the scene where the sisters cut his knights 2.4, others 2.2. Check the edition.
Facts used: short quotations follow standard modern-spelling texts (Folger for Acts 1 and 2; the Globe-based text at Owl Eyes for Act 3, which spells whereso'er). The mock trial appears in the 1608 Quarto only.