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Patrick Page on King Lear and Shakespeare's Villains

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

CHAPTER

How to Deal With Leer's Intermittent Confusion

Leer's dementia seems to be triggered by nothing and it comes and goes. It has a sundowning aspect where it can get worse as the sun goes down at night. I imagine that before the play began, he'd had a year or so of these symptoms. The people who we trust most in the play, i.e. fool, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar, or all people who report that leer was in fact a great man, was a Titanic king.

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