Explore Shakespeare's use of disguise in King Lear.

Many characters in 'King Lear' disguise their intentions towards other characters through their manipulative use of language. For example, Regan and Goneril initially trick their father into disowning his youngest daughter through disguising themselves as dutiful daughters with flattering language. Goneril uses comparatives to proclaim that her father is 'dearer' to her 'than eyesight, space and liberty'. The tricolon of nouns that Goneril states she is ready to relinquish, each as ridiculous as the last, emphasises not only the extent Goneril is willing to go to lie and secure her inheritance, but also shows us how 'blind' Lear already is to the workings in his kingdom and family. He cannot see through the deception of others as a King must be able to do. Cordelia, in contrast, reveals herself to the audience as the character we should sympathise with, due to her inability to disguise herself in language. She asks, 'What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent'. The fact that Cordelia says this as an aside immediately takes the audience into her confidence, and her simple language compared to the long speeches of her sisters is striking. She is brutally honest, as we can see when she says, 'why have my sisters husbands, if they say/ they love you all?' The rhetorical question undermines the flattery of Lear's court. As G. Wilson Knight says, 'Her speech sounds plain and stiff, almost clumsy, but the stiffness is natural. It is the sudden awkwardness of anyone who has been called on to ally herself with hypocrisy'. Cordelia is also presented as Christ-like and with Christian rhetoric, as she she 'redeems nature', the anti-Eve, as if she is unable to deceive. Cordelia is skilled at removing others' disguises through her own wielding of language, but she fails to use language effectively to protect herself.
In contrast, Edgar manages to do exactly this, and whereas Cordelia dies, Edgar, at least in the Folio version, becomes the next ruler of what was Lear's kingdom. Edgar's disguise allows him to confront his own father's failings. Compared to Cordelia, he uses language skilfully not only to maintain his disguise but to manipulate Gloucester until he can 'see feelingly', notably in the Dover cliff scene, in which he uses similes such as fisherman 'like mice' allow him to change his father's perspective. In this sense, he is more similar to Regan and Goneril, but he has learnt to use language to unite rather than divide a kingdom. If Cordelia represents the dying out of a potential female ruler, Edgar - or Albany in the Quarto - represents a young incoming King determined to keep the kingdom together, like James I who warned of the 'seed of division and discord' among his people. As King, Edgar would also be able to understand social conditions in a way Lear was not, due to his use of literal disguise in the play. Sidney argued for the moral good of tragedy, since it 'captures an acute sense of the possibility of social change as a result of real or imagined experience... a growth in empathetic imagination will allow us to see the experiences of the poor better' (Walters). Edgar is introduced as Poor Tom after Lear's speech on 'poor naked wretches' vulnerable to the 'pelting of the pitiless storm', the plosives emphasising the abject conditions those of low social status must endure. Edgar may be being held up a an example for James as Lord Bacon held King Edgar, who reigned from 949, up as an example of leadership.