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 History of King Lear of Shakespeare's text in 1756, it was by no means a complete return to Shakespeare, and he continued to play Tate's Lear in some form to the end of his career. His performances met with enormous success, and continued to draw tears from his audiences, even without Shakespeare's final, tragic scene where Lear enters with Cordelia's body in his arms. As literary critics grew increasingly scornful of Tate, his version still remained "the starting point for performances on the English-speaking stage." John Philip Kemble, in 1809, even dropped some of Garrick's earlier restorations of Shakespeare, and returned several passages to