Thank you, Richard Corum - you blew my mind like no other and bounced me on a new trajectory.
Edmund the bastard son of Gloucester thinks he is the only one engaging subterfuge. Kent is not the primary figure in disguise. And King Lear’s secret role, known to himself, is challenged by another’s. Edgar, legitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, is all these things, tricking his fellow players, arch-conspirators and would-be competitors.
Edgar appears after Edmund has revealed his plot. He is not too involved in countering Edmund’s pronouncements. When he hears that Gloucester has been convinced of Edgar’s treachery, he does not approach him, he does not for the moment fight back. He leaves with hardly a nudge from Edmund, who thinks that Edgar’s nature “is so far from doing harms/ That he suspects none” (1.2.196-97). In the second confrontation, Edmund commands a mock duel, tells Edgar to flee again, adds more to his scheme – “have you not spoken ‘gainst the Duke of Cornwall” – cuts himself with his sword, and Edgar’s only phrase in the scene is “I am sure on ‘it, not a word” (2.1.24, 28). Edgar is out of Gloucester’s house without an effort to deny the accusations; he has not even heard Gloucester’s own interpretations. Note that Gloucester’s acceptance of Edmund’s lies is rather quick and easy, blaming his supposed treachery on the planets and the stars: it must have been reasonable for Edgar to have engaged such a plot. Edgar as a threat is hardly how he is presented in the play.
Edgar on the Heath goes into disguise after running and hiding; he avoids capture; he declares, “Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.21). But he is something. He finds his way to the Heath in order to either meet, or run into, the king. He meets the king again – coincidence? – at Dover, when Gloucester has leaped to his non-death.
Edgar is no more loved by his father than is Edmund. The play opens with this admission. Gloucester says about Edgar, older by a year, “who yet is no dearer in my account” (1.1.20). Edgar is still standing at the end, with Kent and Albany. The remaining duke says to Kent and Edgar, “Friends of my soul, thou twain/Rule in this realm, and the gor’d states sustain” (5.3.318). Edgar has inherited power, and far more than he would have had he become Earl of Gloucester through normal channels. Notably, the three women are dead – Regan, Goneril and Cordelia – as desired by Lear, which sustains the patriarchic system of the noble order. The bastard son, born “in sport” outside the realm of the elites, has also died. The King of France has returned home. And Lear himself is dead. All the Machiavellian machinations considered, the reader and theatergoer must see that Edgar engages a clean sweep of power and bounty; obstacles have been removed. The king was old, at the end of his reign, and he needed to clear England of the threats to the established way: anti-female, and certainly not accepting of a bastard snatching power and land for himself. Both Kent and Edgar, who collect royally at the end of the play, are in disguise throughout. This is literal and symbolic. For most of the play, Shakespeare has them be who they are not.
Edgar kills Oswald and snatches the letter from Goneril to Edmund. He gives the letter to Albany, in yet another disguise. Edgar will “produce a champion that will prove what is avouched” in the letter (5.1.42). Albany bids him to stay while he reads, but Edgar, still plotting, refuses. “I was forbid it,” he says, “when time shall serve, let but the herald cry and I’ll appear again” (4.1.47-8). Edgar calculates that Albany and Edmund’s armies will unite against France, but also that Goneril will be shunned by Albany, ending her little run. Edgar challenges the traitorous Edmund as the climax quickens. A duel is one element of the all-male realm of the elites. Edgar allows that the fight is “the privilege of mine honours, my oath, and my profession” (5.3,130). He has all along been “not sure, though hoping, of this good success,” the success of his own prescient plotting (5.3.194).