Act 2, Scene 3

The open Country.

[Enter Edgar.]
Edgar
1202 I heard myself proclaim'd;
1203 And by the happy hollow of a tree
1204 Escap'd the hunt. No port is free; no place
1205 That guard and most unusual vigilance
1206 Does not attend my taking. While I may scape,
1207 I will preserve myself: and am bethought
1208 To take the basest and most poorest shape
1209 That ever penury, in contempt of man,
1210 Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth;
1211 Blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots;
1212 And with presented nakedness outface
1213 The winds and persecutions of the sky.
1214 The country gives me proof and precedent
1215 Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
1216 Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
1217 Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
1218 And with this horrible object, from low farms,
1219 Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
1220 Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
1221 Enforce their charity.—Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!
1222 That's something yet:—Edgar I nothing am.
[Exit.]

Notes

TLN 1208cultural context
“basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast”
Elizabethan thought pictured creation as a ranked ladder — the 'great chain of being' — with God at the top, then angels, then humans, then animals, then plants. To sink 'near to beast' is to slide down that ladder toward the level of brutes, losing what defines the human: reason and dignity. Edgar chooses the very lowest human form — the naked, filthy, maddened Bedlam beggar — a shape 'penury' (extreme poverty) forces on men who have lost everything.
historical The great chain of being (order and degree)
TLN 1211archaic vocab
“elf all my hair in knots”
To 'elf' hair means to tangle and mat it into the knotted clumps that popular belief attributed to mischievous elves or fairies — sometimes called 'elf-locks.' Edgar plans to let his hair go unwashed and filthy so it clumps into the kind of wild, matted mass that would mark him as a wandering madman.
TLN 1215historical topical
“Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, / Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails”
Bethlem Royal Hospital in London (corrupted to 'Bedlam') housed the mentally ill. Released or counterfeit inmates roamed the countryside as wandering beggars -- known as 'Tom o' Bedlam' or 'Abram-men' -- soliciting charity with wild cries and, by later accounts, driving pins or skewers into their numbed arms as a display of insensibility to prove they were mad. Edgar plans to impersonate one.
historical Harsnett's Declaration and Poor Tom's devils
TLN 1221historical topical
“Poor Turlygod! poor Tom! / That's something yet:—Edgar I nothing am”
'Poor Tom' is the generic name for the wandering Bedlam beggar Edgar is about to become; 'Turlygod' (found only here in Shakespeare) appears to be another name or cry of the same type, though its precise origin is lost. The couplet turns on a radical self-erasure: by taking the identity 'Tom,' Edgar gains 'something' — a survivable disguise — while the man he was, Edgar, becomes 'nothing.' The play puts enormous weight on the word 'nothing': it is what Cordelia says to Lear in 1.1, and it echoes here as the cost of survival.
historical Harsnett's Declaration and Poor Tom's devils