Edmund (King Lear) Edmund (King Lear) Edmund or Edmond is a fictional character and the main antagonist in William Shakespeare's "King Lear". He is the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, and the younger brother of Edgar, the Earl's legitimate son. Early on in the play, Edmund resolves to get rid of his brother, then his father, and become Earl in his own right. He later flirts with both Goneril and Regan and attempts to play them off against each other. Shakespeare's source for the subplot of Edmund, Edgar and Gloucester was a tale from Philip Sidney's "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia" of
King Lear his subjects, not just his children, to address him in paternal terms, which infantises most of the people around him, which pointedly references James's statement in his 1598 book "The Trew Law of Free Monarchies" that the king is the "father of the nation", for whom all of his subjects are his children. "King Lear" provides a basis for "the primary enactment of psychic breakdown in English literary history". The play begins with Lear's "near-fairytale narcissism". Given the absence of legitimate mothers in "King Lear", Coppélia Kahn provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of the "maternal subtext" found in the play. According