Dover Cliff and the Empathetic Imagination
Luke Walters considers the significance of Edgar’s Dover Cliff speech in Shakespeare’s King
Lear.
At the heart of King Lear lies a moment of imaginative virtuosity, so powerful it led A.D. Nuttall to
describe it as:
The most extraordinary moment of audience disorientation in all drama.
This speech occurs at the beginning of Act 4, Scene vi, when Edgar, in the disguise of Poor Tom,
manoeuvres his father towards what Gloucester believes to be the edge of Dover Cliff, the site to
which he has asked to be guided. Gloucester intends to commit suicide, the loss of his eyes and both
his sons (in different ways) having left him desperate, wretched and helpless, ‘From that place/I shall
no leading need.’ Instead of the cliff, Edgar shepherds Gloucester to a flat piece of land on the heath,
hoping he can help ‘cure’ him of his despair through deception. By creating an image of the cliff face
and its vertiginous heights through his language, Edgar convinces Gloucester that his fall is about to
be from the highest of points.
Edgar: Come on sir, here’s the place. Stand still: how fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low.
The crows and the choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade;
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th’unnumbered idle pebble chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
Poetry and Detail
It is a moment of remarkable creativity, both by Shakespeare and his character Edgar, which relies on
the poetry of Edgar’s verse, and the attention to detail conveying a realistic vision. The particular
consideration that Edgar gives to the wildlife in the ‘crows’ and ‘choughs’ is credible, suggesting a cliff
face teeming with bird life, the cumulative effect being the successful creation of another world. This is
enhanced by his use of similes, ‘so gross as beetles’ and
the fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice
impressing upon the waiting Gloucester the magnitude of the fall that he will be undertaking simply
through comparison and perspective. He also conflates humanity with animals, reminding the
audience of the relative insignificance of man viewed at a distance. Having focused on the sense of
sight that is lacking in his father, Edgar pushes beyond the bounds of what would appear believable
and appeals to his father’s sense of hearing, which one would expect to be fully functioning.
‘[T]he murmuring surge’ which one moment appears perceptible is suddenly explained to be inaudible
‘so high’, a possible interpretation being that Gloucester has become suspicious. Edgar returns to
safer ground, ‘I’ll look no more’, as he returns to concentrate on the imagined sight before him. It
seems as if Edgar’s mind reels from the power of the description as he suggests that his, ‘brain’ turns,
…and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
It is as if the imaginary world he is creating is so faithful that it is pulling him in.
Conjuring up a Cliff
The moment becomes even more remarkable when we consider it in the context of the Renaissance
stage where realistic set structures had yet to be introduced and audiences would go to ‘hear’ a play,
rather than see it. The scene would be set through the playwright’s words, as spoken by the
characters. In using words to create the cliff and deceive his father, Edgar, the character, employs the
same technique Shakespeare would have used to conjure up a ‘real’ cliff within the world of the play.
Edgar gives no suggestion beforehand of what he intends to do and, as a result of the spectators’
familiarity with scenes being set by words alone, the audience would have been similarly duped by his
exhaustive and intricately graphic description of the Dover cliff-face. It is a scene in which disbelief is
suspended unintentionally; the audience is cheated by Edgar and also, by extension, by
Shakespeare. His words would have been the play’s reality for the blinded Gloucester and the
metaphorically-blinkered audience. In a moment of complete dramatic empathy, we become
Gloucester: the audience is positioned just as he is, on the cliff edge. In our ‘disorientation’, as Nuttall
puts it, we are precisely positioned by the playwright. The trompe l’oeil or, more accurately, trick of the
ear is so effective it deceives even us.
An Imaginative Empathy
Edgar constructs an alternative world from nothing but his imagination for the sole purpose of healing
his father. Whilst it is based on the same fundamental structures of our world, it is somewhere
fictional, similar but different. Disguised as Poor Tom, Edgar has started to see the world ‘feelingly’:
one of the play’s rallying cries. He has seen the experience of others and has understood and
connected with it. On one level King Lear is a plea for interacting emotionally with others and Edgar’s
speech is a direct empathetic connection. He strives to cure his father whilst visualising a world that is
partly constructed of those in more difficult positions than his own. (This is hinted at earlier in the play
when Edgar acknowledges in his
My tears begin to take his part so much
They mar my counterfeiting
that he empathises with others to such an extent that he may reveal himself.)
The detail of Edgar’s speech is as much about the people who inhabit his imaginary world, those who
risk their lives in the gathering of samphire, ‘dreadful trade’ and ‘the fishermen’ who teem below ‘the
cliff face’, as it is the animals that catch the fabricated gusts. This could be termed an ‘imaginative
empathy’ and it is this that propels Edgar towards those whose plebian circumstances echo those of
his alter-ego, Poor Tom. We can only surmise that, like Lear, Edgar has experienced the landscape of
the poor first hand, having firstly reduced himself to ‘nothing’. In order to cure his father’s despair,
Edgar could have constructed a simpler image of the cliff face, but it is in the type of place he creates
that the meaning rests. It is as much the aesthetic of the speech as the action itself. Edgar is not
looking to see the world entirely anew, but to see it differently, to encourage his father to perceive the
world differently, to ‘see better’. An example of this is that until they learn from experience, Edgar and
Gloucester are unable to use their imaginations to understand that Edmund may be deceiving them:
they cannot see a reason for his ironically creative duplicity.
Re-visioning the World
This process of charting a course from a lack of imagination (in this case being unable to see
Edmund’s true intentions) to imaginative empathy, exists elsewhere in the play. Experience leads key
characters to re-vision their world, seeing those around them in an alternative manner, stimulating
their imaginations and leading them to a changed understanding of others’ situations. This is most
prominent in the character of Lear, whose closed love test at the beginning of the play illustrates a
lack of empathetic imagination. It is almost a childish cloze procedure, a ‘fill in the blanks’, which
permits his daughters little space for any independence, ‘Which of you shall we say does love us
most.’ They are able to say anything as long as it is what he wants to hear. Lear is unable to
understand that Cordelia loves him no less than her sisters, but that she cannot express herself in the
manner that they do or refuses to do so for other reasons. This scene stands as a marked contrast to
Lear’s statements later in the play which demonstrate an improved understanding of humanity in the
form of the peasant classes over which he has ruled. It is here that we can see Lear’s hardships lead
him to appreciate fully, through an expansion of his imagination, those ‘naked wretches’ whose
‘houseless heads and unfed sides’, deal with injustice, poverty and destitution on a daily basis. Like
the ‘dreadful trade’ of the samphire gatherers whom Edgar creates and empathises with, Lear sees
the conditions of oppression that he has been complicit in creating.
A Vision Distilled
In this sense, Dover Cliff strikes at the heart of King Lear, a microcosmic moment where the
playwright distils the play’s vision into a brief speech. It represents King Lear’s central concern, that
change is possible through aesthetic and imaginative constructs, such as the drama itself. It captures
an acute sense of the possibility of social change as a result of real or imagined experience.
Ultimately, King Lear suggests that a growth in empathetic imagination will allow us to see the
experiences of the poor ‘better’ by ‘seeing feelingly’: that we should all have a Dover Cliff moment in
order to perceive our relative place in the world.
Luke Walters is Head of English at Reading Blue Coat School in Sonning and is currently studying for an
MA in Shakespeare studies at the University of London.