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
The Oxford Shakespeare was first printed. This resulted in many controversial choices: for example, presenting "Hamlet" with several famous speeches relegated to appendices on the grounds that Shakespeare added them after the original performances; presenting two separate texts of "King Lear" due to the drastic differences between the two extant texts; and changing the name of Falstaff in "Henry IV Part One" to 'Oldcastle' due to historical evidence that this name was used in the first performances even though it never survived to print. The Oxford "Complete Works" was the first to emphasize Shakespeare's collaborative work, describing "Macbeth", "Measure for Measure" and "Timon