King Lear - Key quotes Flashcards
Duty and obligation of the old feudal system
- “I love your majesty according to my bond”
- “you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.”
Lear crying (emasculation)
- “thou hast power to shake my manhood thus”
- “let not women’s weapons, water drops, stain my man’s cheeks.”
Symbol of blindness
- “see better, Lear”
- “how far your eyes pierce I cannot tell”
Presentation of mortality and decay of the old feudal system
- “while we Unburdened crawl toward death”
- “so be my grave my peace”
- “that we may wake the king? He hath slept long”
Emptiness of value presented through hyperbolic love
- “I love you more than world can wield the matter… beyond what can be valued”
- “she names my very deed of love. Only she comes to short”
Appearance of wealth through the poverty of the state, the empty worth of status
- “honest-hearted fellow, and as poor as the king”
- “Fairest Cordelia, that are most rich being poor”
- “they are not men o’their words. They told me I was everything.”
Manipulation of languages, expressions of equivocation
- “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child”
- “I want that glib and oily art, to speak and purpose not”
Incapacity of language
-“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”
Destruction and breakdown of the paternal relationship
- “the bond is cracked ‘twixt son and father”
- “fed the cuckoo so long, that it’s had it head bit off by it young”
Foolishness, idiocy of the hierarchy
- “the excellent foppery of the world”
- “when majesty falls to folly”
Comparison between wisdom and age
- “Sir, I am too old to learn”
- “thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise”
Physical paring, emptiness of the head (loss of wisdom)
- “the two crowns of the egg”
- “thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides and left nothing i’th’middle”
Foolishness of Lear, physical search for identity
- “O fool, I shall go mad”
- “who is it that can tell me who I am? / Lear’s shadow”
Rejection of the truth, falsity
- “wisdom bids fear”
- “truth’s a dog must to kennel. He must (be) whipped out”
Offering to the legitimate child, the transgression of power, support of old feudal system
- “I gave you all / And in good time you gave it”
- “Fathers that wear rags do make their children blind, but fathers that bear bags shall see their children kind”
Subversion of nature and status
-“Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land”
-“I would unstate myself”
“only we shall retain the name and all th’ addition to a king”
Expressions of absence
- “nothing can be made out of nothing”
- “nothing will come of nothing, speak again”
The anger of the patriarch against the disloyal child
- “come not between the dragon and his wrath”
- “abhorred villain, unnatural, detested, brutish villain”
Rejection of the old feudal system to find identity of self
- “I will forget my nature”
- “Edgar I nothing am”
Appearance of fate, constant cycle of good and bad fortune
- “striving to better, oft we mar what’s well”
- “when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following”
Blood as a symbol of obligation and duty (sin)
- “my corrupted blood”
- “thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter, or rather a disease that’s in my flesh”
Suffering of the self, unknowing
- “tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself”
- “we are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body.”
Destruction of the physical chain of being has set the world into turmoil, the loss of the head
- “the realm of Albion/ Come to great confusion.”
- “where’s the king.”
Lear and Edgar are enslaved to the natural powers and fortune
- “here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.”
- “what are you?// A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows”
Outward expressions of grief and pain
- “grief hath crazed my wits”
- “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks”
Breakdown of natural world, shift
- “Crack nature’s moulds”
- “o ruined piece of nature”
- “cure this great breach in his abused nature”
The storm as a representation of the daughters
-“Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters… I never gave you kingdom, called you children.”
Greed of the world portrayed in the storm
-“thou all-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world”
Encroaching madness of the night, devolved into foolishness
- “O that way madness lies”
- “the cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen”
- “Here’s a night pities neither wise men nor fools”
Physical blindness
- “vile jelly”
- “all dark and comfortless”
- “his bleeding rings, their precious stones new-lost”
Presentation of sin and the incapacity of the justice system
-“unwhipped of justice”
-“I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”
“the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks”
Restoration of sympathy and sub-hamartia of Lear
- “my wits begin to turn”
- “I have one part in my heart that’s sorry yet for thee”
Marxist reversion of the state, the young against the old
- “the younger rises when the old doth fall”
- “our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile, that it doth hate what gets it”
Appearance of the ‘pelican daughters’ and the transubstantiation of the father
- “filial ingratitude. Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand for lifting food to’t?”
- “your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all-“
- “child-changed father”
Nakedness, the stripping bare of one’s soul
- “poor naked wretches”
- “off, off, you lendings!”
- “unaccomadated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal”
Loss of familial loyalty and bonds
- “his daughters seek his death”
- “thou shalt find a dearer father in my love”
- “I shalt see the winged vengeance overtake such children”
Apparent innocence of the female
-“the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father are not fit for your beholding”
The disillusionment that follows power and symbols of power
- “the art of our necessities is strange, and can make vile things precious”
- “robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold.”
Images of smell, olfactory, and allusion to sin
- “there I smelt them out”
- “let him smell his way to Dover”
- “let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality”
Presentation of the monstrosity of femininity
- “women will all turn monsters” (Quarto)
- “see thyself, devil: proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in woman”
Cordelia’s death
- “I know when one is dead and when one lives. She’s as dead as earth”
- “Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little”
Lear is subjected to the machinations of fate
- “he hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer”
- “I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead”
Futility of life, overwhelming insignificance
- “as flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods; they kill us for their sport”
- “all’s cheerless, dark, and deadly”
- “when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
metaphorical blindness of Gloucester, and the possibility of sight in companionship with the foolish
- “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes: I stumbled when I saw”
- “tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind”
Cruelty of youth
- “gilded serpents”
- “I would not see thy cruel nails pluck out his poor old eyes”
Search for forgiveness and redemption
- “forget and forgive. I am old and foolish”
- “I pant for life. Some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature.”
Final message, the implication of human error
-“speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”
