The Man of Sorrows: Edgar’s Disguise and Dürer’s Self-portraits

In King Lear, Edgar transforms himself from a young aristocrat into the mad beggar, Tom o’Bedlam. Naked except for the blanket that covers his loins, he assumes the image of the Man of Sorrows. He tells Lear that, in his former life, he was a dandy dedicated to cultivating his own looks, spending his time in illicit and multiple sexual relations, in drink and dicing. This is a homiletic picture of himself as a typical courtier, guilty of the deadly sin of vanity. The icon of the Man of Sorrows is familiar from countless paintings, and Shakespeare uses the traditional visual image, lifting it out of its religious context and giving it a Humanist significance. Perhaps the most pertinent visual images are those in which Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) represented himself as the Man of Sorrows. In his earlier self-portraits, he appears as a handsome young man, well-dressed and carefully coiffed, reminding us of Poor Tom’s account of his past as a frivolous courtier. In her comparative study of Shakespeare and Dürer, Hanna Scolnicov argues that recognizing the surprising images shared by the two helps uncover the conceptual world of the play.