King Lear Flashcards
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiousity of nations to deprive me?
For what am i some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why ‘bastard’? wherefore ‘base’?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With ‘base’? with ‘baseness’? ‘bastardy’? ‘base, base’?
Who in the lusty state of nature take
More composition and fierce qu ality
Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed
Go to th’creating a whole tribe of fops
Got t’ween a sleep and a wake? Well then
Legitimate Edgar, i must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard, Edmond,
As to th’legitimate. Fine word ‘legitimate’.
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my intention thrive, Edmond the base
Shall to th’legitimate. I grow; i prosper;
Now gods, stand up for bastards!
King Lear;
Edmond questions why he is regarded as an inferior because his parents were not married. He has a plot to replace his brother, Edgar, as his father’s heir.
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no
Good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus
And thus, yet nature finds itself scorged by the sequent effects.
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities,
Mutinies; in countries, dicord; in palaces, treason; and the
Bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes
Under the prediction: there’s son against father. The king falls
From bias of nature, there’s father against child. We have seen
The best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and
All ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find
Out this villain, Edmond, it shall lose thee nothing. Do it
Carefully. And the noble and true hearted Kent banished; his
Offence, honesty. ‘tis strange.
King Lear
Gloucester sees Edgar’s treachery as part of a breakdown in society foretold by recent eclipses of the sun and the moon
This is the excellent floppery of the world, that when we
Are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we
Make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars; as if
We were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion,
Knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pedominance,
Drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obdience of
Planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
Thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay
His goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father
Compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s tail, and my
Nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows, i am rough and
Lecherous. I should have been that i am had the maidenliest
Star in the firmament twinkled on my bastarding.
King Lear
Edmond rejects superstitious belief in astrology, the influence of the stars on human affairs.
Detested kite, thou liest!
My train are men of choice and rarest parts,
That all particulars of duty know,
And in the most extact regard support
The worship of their name. O most small fault,
How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show!
Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature
From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love,
And added to the gall. O Lear, Lear, Lear.
Beat at this gate that let thy folly in
And thy dear judgements out. Go, go, my people.
King Lear
Lear to Gonerill
He attack sGonerill’s ingratitude and defends his followers’ honour. He expresses anguish at his treatment of Cordelia.
It may be so, my lord.
Hear, nature, hear, dear goddess, hear:
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruifull.
Into her womb convey sterility,
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her. If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her.
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child. Away, away!
King Lear
Lear curses Gonerill with childlessness or unloving children.
I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.
I will not trouble thee, my child. Farewell.
We’ll no more meet, no more see one another.
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter,
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which i must needs call mine. Thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle
In my corrupted blood. But i’ll not chide thee;
Let shame come when it will, i do not call it.
I do not bid the thunder-bearer shoot,
Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove.
Mend when thou canst, be better at thy leisure;
I can be patient, i can stay qith Raegan,
And my hundred knights.
King Lear
Lear curses Gonerill and renounces her. He decides to stay with Raegan with his 100 followers.
O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need –
You heavens, give me that patience, patience i need.
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both;
If it be you that stirs these daughter’s hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water drops,
Stain my old man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall – i will do no such things –
What they are, yet i know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! You think i’ll weep;
No, i’ll not weep!
King Lear
Lear says that if our requirements are no more than the very basic necessities, then a human life is worth no more than an animals. He issues a terrifying but confused threat against his daughters. He says that nothing will make him weep and he fears he will go mad.
X – Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,
You cataracts and huricanoe, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned in the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.
Y- O, nuncle, court holy water in a dry house is better than this
Rain-water out o’door. Good nuncle, in, ask thy daughters
Blessing. Here’s a night pities neither wise men nor fools.
X- Rumble thy bellyful; spit, fire; sprout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, called you children.
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here i stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man;
But yet i call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘tis foul!
King Lear
Lear and the fool talking. The fool advices him to find shelter but Lear refuses and accuses the storm of joining forces with his daughters.
Ay, every inch a king.
When i do stare, see how the subject quakes.
I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause?
Aultery?
Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? No,
The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive: for Gloucester’s bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got t’ween the lawful sheets.
To’t, luxury, pell-mell, for I lack soldiers.
Behold yon simp’ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name.
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they’re centaurs,
Though women all above.
But to the girdle to the gods inherit;
Beneath is all the fiend’s.
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphorous pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten my
Imagination: there;s money for thee.
King Lear
Lear shows an obsessive interest in sex and an intense fear and loathing of women’s sexual desires. He sees evidence of sexuality all around him.
To both these sisters i have sworn my love,
Each jealous of the other as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall i take?
Both? One? Or neither? Neither can be enjoyed
If both remain alive. To take the widow
Exasperates, makes mad her sister,
And hardly shall i carry out my side,
Her husband being alive. Now the, we’ll use
His countenance for the battle, which being done,
Let her who would be rid of him devise
His speedy taking off. As for the mercy
Which he intends to Lear and Cordelia,
The battle done, and they within our power,
Shall never see his pardon; for my state
Stands on me to defend, not to debate.
King Lear
Edmond reveals that he has sworn love to both of the sisters. He wishes to see Albany, Lear and Cordelia dead.
No, no,no, no! Come let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, i’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rouges
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too-
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
As if we were god’s spies; and we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’moon.
King Lear
Lear is joyful to be imprisoned with Cordelia. they will ock the petty quarrels of the court.
