Another admirable aspect of Edmund’s personality is his arrogance and self-belief. Arrogance is not always portrayed as a good thing and if you are faced with Edmund it is probably not, but from a spectators point of view it is so impressive how Edmund will back himself no matter what circumstance, no matter what the situation. This is ultimately his downfall when his arrogance (“In wisdom I should ask thy name/ But since thy outside looks so fair and warlike, / And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes, / What safe and nicely I might well delay / By the rule of knighthood I disdain and spurn.”) blinkered any sort of rational assessment and allowed him to go to combat after a long battle against his relatively fresh brother. As I mentioned Edmund’s self-belief is also very impressive. He understands that this is necessary for him to succeed, for without it he would fail as he would not think himself man enough to complete the tasks due to the audacity of what he himself requires. He says himself “To be tender minded / Does not become a sword.” He asks himself a lot of questions too, normally rhetorical as they seem to motivate his character. For example in his opening soliloquy he says “Wherefore should I / Stand in the plague of custom, and permit / The curiosity of nations to deprive me? / For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines / Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?” It is this constant questioning of the system that makes me respect him. The unwillingness to back down and live like the bastard he is meant to be. In many ways Edmund is an early example of an entrepreneur, starting with nothing and almost finishing with everything. “Edmund the base / Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper: / Now gods, stand up for bastards!”
The final, if surprising, characteristic of Edmund that makes me admire him is seen only in the last scene of the play. It is his repentance and humility. At the point of his death when he realises he is dying Edmund looks to do some good in his life. HE says “Some good I mean to do / Despite of mine own nature.” He says this in reference to preventing the death of Cordelia which he has recently ordered. The way he says “Despite of mine own nature”, makes us think that Edmund is evil by nature and therefore we classify him as a bad character, but I would argue that surely as he is doing this against his own nature, his repentance is surely all the more impressive and genuine as this really runs against the vein. It may also be that in doing this Edmund is in fact just looking to satisfy his own conscience rather than help Cordelia but the gesture itself is still very impressive. He also admits that he was possibly wrong about the nobles at the beginning of the play and that even though they are in the position they are in by birth, perhaps they deserve to be there also. He says to Edgar “If thou art noble, I do forgive thee.”
However, Edmund is far from being a good character in the play and in fact is at the source of more pain and hurt than any other member of the cast. Firstly he is extremely selfish, which is a horrible trait. He will do absolutely anything for self advancement no matter who he hurts and in his case it is his family. He says “This seems a fair deserving and must draw me / That which my father loses, no less than all.” He is willing to ruin the man who loves him possibly more than anyone else in the world, a man who fathered him and raised him (although he may have been absent as Edmund is a bastard) all to get himself a title and some money. He says in the same speech as the previous quote “The younger rises when the old doth fall.” This is absolutely terrible again and is in many ways, due to the centrally based role of families nowadays, almost unthinkable. It is a fact of life that he will grow stronger as Gloucester ages, but how he accelerates and warps the process is no less than evil. He has no value for his family at all; they are merely pawns in his game of advancement. He says of them “A credulous father and a brother noble / Whose nature is so far from doing harms / That he suspects none – on whose foolish honesty / My practices ride easy.” I do not like here how he decides to link the words credulous and noble as if they are synonymous. His mockery of nobility is worrying as most gentlemen are supposed to possess some but his complete rejection of it makes him seem almost heartless. He also criticises the blind faith both his father and brother have in him, implying he feels it should be each for their own, again emphasising his selfish nature. However I do wonder if Edmund does quite realise just what a ‘monster of selfishness’ (MRSN) he can be. After all there are certain moments when he seems to believe that what he is doing is as much for others as it is for him. For example, when he says he will slay Lear and Cordelia after the battle he says “for my state / Stands on me to defend, not to debate.” He seems here to be under the impression that what he is doing will be for the good of England and not just for him. I would have initially when reading this said he was lying but as he is soliloquising he must be under the impression he is right.
The other terrible characteristic of Edmund which is really terrible is how he lies to people and how he uses people. Prime examples of this are all around him, in fact I cannot think of many instances in the play where hew really is being genuine. The characters he chooses to use the most are without a doubt Regan and Goneril. As I have already mentioned both are smitten with him and Edmund knowing this uses them to the best of his ability. He leads them on a lot, flattering them and making them think that he is reciprocating their feelings towards him, for example when he says to Regan “Yours in the ranks of death.” There is something slightly sinister about this which would obviously appeal to Regan’s darker side, but he also knows this is exactly what she wants to here. You can imagine when he says this Regan inside giving off a little girlish giggle, excited by the prospects of what she believes to be their fledgling romance and giddy from the chase. Edmund also uses people as it seems he is afraid to get his hands dirty. He is after all indirectly responsible for most of the misery within this play but it is very rarely him that delivers the final blow. An example of this is the captain that he sends to kill Lear and Cordelia. He says to him, “Take thou this note. Go, follow them to prison. / One step I have advanced thee. If thou dost / As this instructs thee, thou dost make thy way / To noble fortunes.” Unlike what I feel may be the case with the selfishness Edmund knows exactly what he is doing when using and lying to people. He will milk them for all he can before moving on and unfortunately for him they are merely devices, he feels nothing more for them. An example of this is with Regan and Goneril when he discovers they are dead and he says “Yet Edmund was beloved.” This shows that he never felt for them as he explicitly implies here that they loved him but he never loved them. It also highlights his selfishness again as it seems he is more upset by the fact that nobody loves him anymore than he is by the sister’s death.
So in conclusion, I do admire Edmund. Fundamentally he is a bad person but this does not mean you cannot admire him. For example Oliver Cromwell is greatly admired throughout most of Britain as one of the greatest leaders, military and political that has ever lived yet he still slaughter tens of thousands of Irish citizens, many of whom had surrendered or were women and children. It is easier to admire Edmund in the play than it probably should be also, when he is compared to the other bad characters Regan, Cornwall and Goneril who all by comparison seem a lot worse. Looking at what Edmund has done as well also prompts the question is he actually evil, or just selfish? Everything he has done has been for his own advancement and he can never carry out the worst of acts himself, he leaves that duty to others. At the end of the play when he attempts to save Cordelia and Lear when he realises he will die and hence has nothing to lose, he reveals his information ungrudgingly. He is hugely philosophical about it, he tried his best and even though he came so close to succeeding he ultimately failed ending up where he started, with nothing . To quote Edmund “The wheel is gone full circle”, and he can die with dignity knowing he did the best he ever could.
