74 pages • 2 hours read
William ShakespeareKing Lear
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1606A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Act IIIChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act III, Scene 1 Summary
Out on the heath in a raging storm, Kent meets a gentleman who tells him he’s seen Lear, running wild and shouting into the wind and rain. The conditions are so wild that even “the cub-drawn bear would couch,/The lion and the belly-pinchèd wolf/Keep their fur dry” (12-14). Yet the elderly and maddened Lear is exposed to the elements. Kent warns this gentleman that Albany and Cornwall are secretly plotting against each other and that the King of France—Cordelia’s new husband—plans to invade and take the country back from these treacherous dukes. If the gentleman goes to Dover, he can deliver news of Lear’s plight and give Cordelia Kent’s ring as a token. The gentleman agrees, and Kent rushes off to search for Lear.
Act III, Scene 2 Summary
Lear, followed by the loyal Fool, spits fury at the weather:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!/You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks./You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,/Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,/Singe my white head (1-6).
The Fool struggles to get his master to shelter. Lear continues to rage at the sky, and the sky rages back.
Kent joins the Fool in an attempt to get Lear into the shelter of a nearby hovel. Lear comes back to himself for a moment, understanding that he’s losing his mind. He also returns to the people around him, asking the Fool: “How dost, my boy? Art cold?/I am cold myself” (69-70). He agrees to go to the hovel. The shaken Fool ends the scene with a cryptic prophecy of confusion and danger in England.
Act III, Scene 3 Summary
Gloucester confides in Edmund: he is appalled by the way Lear’s daughters treat their father. When he objected, he reports, Cornwall and Regan turned him out of his own house and forbade him from communicating with Lear.
He goes on, explaining the two dukes’ secret enmity and telling Edmund he received a confidential letter about the approaching French invasion. He plans to rescue Lear, regardless of Cornwall and Regan’s prohibitions.
All of these confidences play right into Edmund’s hands. After his father departs, he vows, “This courtesy forbid thee shall the duke/Instantly know, and of that letter too,” and relishes his imminent victory: “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (20-24).
Act III, Scene 4 Summary
Kent leads Lear and the Fool to the hovel. Still bewailing his daughters’ betrayal, Lear hurries his friends in first. In a moment of lucidity, he pauses to think of all the “poor naked wretches” (30) enduring this storm with him even now.
Just then, a scream comes from within the hovel, and the Fool rushes out, claiming there’s a lunatic inside. This is “lunatic” is Edgar, deep in disguise as the beggar Poor Tom. Edgar raves, speaking of “the foul fiend” and singing snatches of bawdy ballads. Lear takes to this madman immediately and personally, believing that only treacherous daughters like his own could have made this man so mad. He deliriously interrogates Edgar and strips off his own clothing in imitation of this naked beggar. The beleaguered Fool tries to forestall him: “Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ‘tis a naughty night to swim in” (110-11).
Gloucester arrives. Without recognizing his own son, he hurries the group toward a safe house. Edgar must listen and keep his disguise up as Gloucester describes his son’s supposed betrayal, lamenting, “I loved him, friend,/No father his son dearer” (167-68).
Act III, Scene 5 Summary
Edmund delivers his father’s intelligence about the French invasion directly to Cornwall, who hurries to inform Regan. Cornwall also tells Edmund that his betrayal of his father has made him the Earl of Gloucester. Edmund will take his father’s title, and Cornwall will treat him as his own son.
Act III, Scene 6 Summary
Kent and Gloucester bring Lear to a safe house. Edgar keeps up his mad ranting, speaking of damnation. Lear, spurred on, hallucinates an imaginary courtroom in which he puts his daughters on trial while the Fool and Edgar play along with his delusions. Edgar is so moved to intense pity by Lear’s madness that his tears threaten his disguise.
At last, Lear falls into a troubled sleep. Gloucester and Kent return to collect him in a litter vehicle and carry him to Dover, where Cordelia’s army will offer him sanctuary.
Everyone departs but Edgar, who remains to reflect on his experience with the king: “How light and portable my pain seems now,/When that which makes me bend makes the king bow” (107-108).
Act III, Scene 7 Summary
Goneril, Regan, Albany, Cornwall, and Edmund meet to plot revenge on Gloucester, whom they’ve captured for supporting Cordelia and rescuing Lear. Goneril and Edmund depart to prepare for war, leaving Regan and Cornwall to deal with Gloucester.
The bloodthirsty couple tie Gloucester up and interrogate him, ignoring his cries for decency and mercy. When he doesn’t give them the answers they want, Cornwall puts out one of his eyes. Regan won’t be satisfied until he puts out the other. But as Cornwall moves to do just this, one of his horrified servants, horrified tries to fight him off. After a bloody struggle, Cornwall kills him and completes the job, blinding Gloucester as he recites these terrible words: “Out, vile jelly./Where is thy luster now?” (84-85).
When Gloucester howls for Edmund, Cornwall and Regan reveal that Edmund betrayed him. They throw him out into the storm again to “smell/his way to Dover” (94-95). Cornwall realizes his servant mortally wounded him.
The scene ends as two traumatized servants make plans to help the unfortunate Gloucester, bandaging his bleeding eye sockets and finding him a guide.
Act III Analysis
Act III contains one of the most famous scenes in all of world literature: Lear’s mad caper in the storm. An image of man as a tiny, angry, frightened speck amid wild nature, the storm scene is at once harrowing and blackly comical. Through this confrontation between despair and absurdity, the play’s most vivid picture of the human condition emerges.
As Lear leaps around naked and Edgar rants and raves, a strange coherence emerges from their lunacy. While Edgar’s madness is feigned and Lear’s is true, both men come to a deeper understanding of their own natures—and human nature—through their seeming disconnect from reality. For Edgar, the externalizing of his internal predicament as a loveless exile driven to despair by treachery provides a strange relief; his mad-speak is as inventive and exuberant as it is horrific. For Lear, the sight of Edgar’s naked misery brings him to the realization that every man, himself included, is nothing but a “poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.108). It’s through this realization that Lear finds his way to empathy for the first time—an empathy that demands he relinquish his puffed-up self image as mighty king. Later, this behavior will be referred to as “reason in madness.” This runs counter to Edmund and Cornwall’s “madness in reason,” a self-interested rationality that results in so much blood and death.
These scenes also mark the beginning of Edgar’s role as an artist. Just as Edgar externalizes his misery in a kind of performance art, he provides a model and a mirror for Lear. Lear sees himself in Edgar, even accusing Edgar’s nonexistent daughters of having brought him to this pass, and finds a curious relief in that seeing. While the play offers no pat answers to questions of human suffering and human evil, it suggests that one way to grapple with these concepts is by creating artistic reflections of them—the better to see them, feel them, and even play with them. The poet John Keats would later remark on this quality in King Lear, writing that its truthfulness makes it beautiful even though it depicts horrors.
But art isn’t a total solution to the mysteries of evil and pain, and Gloucester’s gruesome blinding makes that very clear. This scene is at once symbolic—Gloucester, who has proven so bad at seeing what’s true, can only see what’s real after he loses his literal eyes—and nastily concrete. The sadistic Cornwall’s cry, “Out, vile jelly./Where is thy luster now?” (3.7.84-85), returns us once more to the irreducible facts of the human body: its vulnerability and its mortality.
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