i. 165),
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
Upon thy foul disease.
Did Lear remember this phrase when he called Goneril 'a disease that's
in my flesh' (II. iv. 225)?
Again, the observant reader may have noticed that Goneril is not only
represented as the fiercer and more determined of the two sisters but
also strikes one as the more sensual. And with this may be connected one
or two somewhat curious points: Kent's comparison of Goneril to the
figure of Vanity in the Morality plays (II. ii. 38); the Fool's
apparently quite irrelevant remark (though his remarks are scarcely ever
so), 'For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass'
(III. ii. 35); Kent's reference to Oswald (long before there is any sign
of Goneril's intrigue with Edmund) as 'one that would be a bawd in way
of good service' (II. ii. 20); and Edgar's words to the corpse of Oswald
(IV. vi. 257), also spoken before he knew anything of the intrigue with
Edmund,
I know thee well: a serviceable villain;
As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
As badness would desire.
Perhaps Shakespeare had conceived Goneril as a woman who before her
marriage had shown signs of sensual vice; but the distinct indications
of this idea were crowded out of his exposition when he came to write
it, or, being inserted, were afterwards excised.
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