"The Wheel Is Come Full Circle. I Am Here." What Is the Audience of King Lear Meant to Feel About Edmond at the End of the Play?

1. “The wheel is come full circle. I am here.” What is the audience meant to feel about Edmond at the end of the play?
The Edmond presented to us at the close of play is a contradiction of all we know of him. Edmond is corrupt; malicious; jealous; bitter, and yet with his final moments, Shakespeare offers him a chance at redemption. Perhaps this is intended to suggest that no man is beyond salvation; perhaps a sop to the principle that all nobility is inherently good (even the half-bloods), although Edgar does state sententiously: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us” (5.3.160); but the closing scene conflicts with everything that has come before. Shakespeare has taken care throughout the play to make the audience implicit in Edmond’s crimes (as in the deliberate use of the plural pronoun in the soliloquy of 1.1.104-110), no matter how heinous. Edmond is corrupt, but beautiful; the ease with which he prosecutes his lies and plots (and Gonerill and Regan are clearly no chamber maids) cannot but impress and this, coupled with that sense of shared complicity, means Shakespeare cannot let Edmond die damned and unredeemed; to do so would be to damn every member of the audience who thrilled at his dark audacity from his soliloquy of act II, scene 1.
We first encounter Edmond as dutiful son, albeit one who “came somewhat saucily into the world before he was sent for” (1.1.17). If anything, we are inclined to sympathise with the “young fellow” (particularly following his father’s boasting, and consequent thoughtless admission in Edmonds presence that the “whoreson must be acknowledged” – 1.1.19), but this Edmond is shattered the first time we are left alone with him on stage. What begins as a plea to pagan gods turns into first rage against the establishment, then quickly resentment towards “honest madam’s issue...” (1.2.9), and his father. That Edmond is not against nobility on principle is proven in the final scene of the play...