Gloucester has secretly helped the king and has a letter about the French army. Edmund betrays him. Cornwall and Regan have him bound to a chair in his own house. Regan plucks his beard. They interrogate him: why did you send the king to Dover? Gloucester answers with defiance: “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes… But I shall see / The winged vengeance overtake such children.”
“See’t shalt thou never,” says Cornwall — and gouges out one eye. A servant, who has served Cornwall since childhood, cannot bear it: he draws his sword and wounds his master — and Regan stabs him from behind. Cornwall puts out the other eye: “Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?”
Gloucester cries for his son Edmund to avenge him. Regan tells him: it was Edmund who betrayed you. In darkness, he sees the truth: “O my follies! Then Edgar was abused. / Kind gods, forgive me that, and prosper him!” “Go thrust him out at gates,” says Regan, “and let him smell / His way to Dover.”
Why it matters. The play’s central metaphor — sight and blindness — becomes literal. Gloucester had eyes and could not see his sons; blinded, he sees. Later he says it outright: “I stumbled when I saw.” And the nameless servant who dies trying to stop the cruelty is one of the quiet moral heroes of Shakespeare.
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Lear’s youngest daughter, who will not flatter, is disinherited, returns to rescue him, forgives him with “No cause, no cause” — and is hanged.
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Edgar leads his blind father to a “cliff” that isn’t there, lets him leap, and convinces him he has survived by a miracle — curing his despair with a theatrical trick.