Disguise and Doubling: Casting King Lear

Abstract

n this essay I will advance a contrarian (though not original) claim about theater history—that it is far more likely that Robert Armin, the company clown of the King’sMen, played Edgar, rather than the Fool, in the original casting of King Lear—and I will use this argument as a gateway to revisiting the familiar and widely contested hypothesis that the roles of Cordelia and the Fool were originally doubled by a boy actor. I will show how a wealth of circumstantial evidence supports the likelihood that the disguising of the character of Edgar as a Bedlam beggar served as a vehicle both for unleashing Armin’s improvisatory skills and for exploiting his cultural profile, and I contend that Armin’s portrayal of the mocknatural fool Poor Tom functions as a metatheatrical device designed to lay the groundwork for the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool. This set of conceptual castings has two significant interpretive implications: (1) Instead of Armin (as Fool) leaving the play near its midpoint, Armin as Tom is able to upstage the young actor who has usurped his usual role as the licensed court fool; and (2) when Lear is accompanied in exile not only by two disguised figures (Kent/Caius and Edgar/ Tom) but also by a doubled actor, the performative logic of the play reflects its moral logic. As the complementary devices of disguise and doubling incrementally transcend realism, they magnify the scale of the challenges Lear faces as he tries to settle his moral accounts before he dies. Lear’s serial recognition scenes with familiar but obscured figures—the disfigured Gloucester and the disguised Kent and Edgar—rehearse the logic of a morality play as they register Lear’s acknowledgments of his moral debts to his closest followers. It is always possible for Lear to penetrate the disguises and discover that Caius is really Kent and that Tom is Edgar, but a doubled Cordelia/Fool presents a challenge of a different order. Lear’s finalmisrecognition of Cordelia as “mypoor fool” (Q 24.300) ismore than