Edgar’s homo sacer lessons: curating identity in King Lear

This essay reinterprets Edgar in King Lear through the frame of cabinets of curiosities, with “carnival” and homo sacer as supporting lenses. I argue that the play behaves like a theatrical cabinet, a curated space of display and comparison in which familiar social types are estranged and exhibited. Edgar’s sequence of roles forms a serial display of personae. I call these shifts “transdressings”: changes of habit and idiom keyed to material exchange and social mobility. Poor Tom functions as a zero-specimen (homo sacer), against which later personae gain legibility; carnival supplies the licence and estrangement that make this pedagogy of wonder intelligible. Crucially, Edgar is both curator and specimen, arranging his own sequence so that Gloucester and the audience are moved from astonishment towards discernment. Lear, by contrast, cannot follow him and ultimately fails to curate himself: his descent resists collection and so closes off festive recovery. On this reading, Edgar’s self-curated series aligns the play with early modern practices of display, while Lear’s uncurated collapse marks the tragic limit of that festive cabinet logic.