First, in a scene of twenty-three lines,
mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son Edmund how Goneril
and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to succour the houseless
King; how a secret letter has reached him, announcing the arrival of a
French force; and how, whatever the consequences may be, he is
determined to relieve his old master. Edmund, left alone, soliloquises
in words which seem to freeze one's blood:
This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke
Instantly know; and of that letter too:
This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
That which my father loses; no less than all:
The younger rises when the old doth fall.
He goes out; and the next moment, as the fourth scene opens, we find
ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the
inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others
to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's
sake, to seek shelter in the hovel:
Come, your hovel.
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.
But on the way he has broken down and has been weeping (III. iv. 17),
and now he resists Kent's efforts to persuade him to enter.
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