Cut

Those servants who assist Gloucester after he has been cruelly blinded by Cornwall & Regan in what is possibly the darkest scene in Shakespeare only do so in the early Quarto edition. By the Folio they are gone and Gloucester must smell his way to Dover alone. Leaving them out certainly adds pace, but something deeper is lost. Had Shakespeare changed his mind about the nature of man when making the adaptation of Lear for the Folio? The tenderness of the flax and whites of eggs they apply to the old man's bleeding sockets (in itself a powerfully visceral image) seems to suggest there is hope for us all. Compassion is the natural order of things. It's the Cornwalls and Regans of the world that are the aberrations. But not in the Folio.

I've always felt the truth of the scene as it stood originally, at least on a good day. Nearly all modern directors leave it out. That says much about the temper of our times and how easy it is to be cynical. (And I'm sure it's a tricky sequence to direct in simple terms of keeping the flow.) But there's still that haunting question of why Shakespeare chose to do without it and the fear he had come to see it as offering illusory comfort.

I suppose a kind of resolution might lie in attempting to bind the wounds of the world in our own small ways. There are certainly more than enough to go round.