‘Poor Tom O’Bedlam’: Identifying the Subsistence Migrants of Early Modern England in Shakespeare’s King Lear

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ABSTRACT In the early 1600s, English agriculture was punctuated by dearth, generated by the changes in climate and weather and exacerbated by poor resource management which affected the socio-economic circumstances of the country. This article identifies the challenges that dearth caused and shows how these trials are reflected in Shakespeare’s King Lear through the figure of ‘Poor Tom’. Shakespeare constructs ‘Poor Tom’ as a type of the ‘Bedlam beggar’ in which the plight of the ‘subsistence migrant’ in early seventeenth-century England can be seen. The article shows that subsistence migrants were not just products of the harsh weather and poor harvests but they were also shaped in the popular imagination by social attitudes of intolerance and prejudice towards them. It is these environmental forces and societal factors that combine to create ‘Poor Tom’, for while the weather might make beggars of the rural poor, it was society that made ‘monsters’ of those who were forced to migrate to London in search of work and food. Edgar articulates these societal prejudices when donning his disguise as the ‘Bedlam beggar’ in King Lear – a disguise which, I argue, connects the dislocated presence of Tom in the storm to London and the urban audience of Shakespeare’s playhouse.