Eye Gouging

There's been a lot of discussion about Gloucester losing his eyes, and whether or not it was an over-the-top punishment for his perceived crime. I kind of doubted it, and here's why. As far as Cornwall knows, Gloucester was a traitor. Going into this, I didn't know tons about penalties for treason, but I did know that people who were branded as traitors tended to be pretty harshly punished.

I googled the phrase "eye-gouging as punishment for treason," and I came across the book The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Medieval France by S.H. Cuttler. I know that King Lear isn't set in France, but the time period is about right. Here's what he has to say on the subject: "Not all the penalties [for treason] were capital: one could be put on the pillory or on the rack, or have one's eyes gouged out. Because treason could take many forms, the punishment could be made to fit the crime."

It sounds to me like eye-gouging was a fairly normal punishment - at least normal enough to come up in a completely unrelated, scholarly discussion on treason. In fact, for a traitor, Gloucester may have even gotten off easy - a courtesy from Cornwall, who had to have been devastated and betrayed. Granted, Gloucester actually wasn't a traitor, so the fact that he lost his eyes for a crime he didn't commit was hugely unfortunate. That being said, if Gloucester actually was a traitor, we the audience would feel that Cornwall was completely justified. We might actually be surprised that Cornwall didn't kill him.

 I suspect that Shakespeare would have been very aware of treason and its punishment. After all, he didn't exist in a vacuum, and the idea of treason was an especially big deal during the reigns of Henry VII though Elizabeth I. If historical accounts (and Phillipa Gregory novels) are to be believed, so-called traitors were getting hauled off to the Tower left and right.