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”
