King Lear quotations (play and critical) Flashcards
“The King has two capacities…a body natural…the other is a body politic”
Kantorowicz, - Doubling of King Lear
“the body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the body natural now dead to another body natural”
Kantorowicz, - Doubling of King Lear
“Lear voids the referent but clutches at the empty signifier.”
Terry Eagleton - language
“The frustration resulting from his disappointment causes him to rail indiscriminately at all that repulses him and to take action…and seize, either through force, guile, or manipulation, those things that he desires.”
James R. Keller - Edmund and the bastard
“they have a clear motive to contest the dominant, hegemonic ideology, which defends a particular aristocratic mode of property inheritance: from father, to first-born, legitimate son.”
Susan Bruce - Edmund and the bastard
“Gloucester, upset by the false evidence of Edgar’s treachery planted by Edmund, gives us his version of the world in which man is governed by the state of the universe, in which human behaviour and emotion, including the love of parent and child which we have just seen disputed in the first scene, are governed by extremes. “
Fintan O’Toole - Edmund and the bastard
“the new determination not to be bound by the rule of custom which Edmund sees as a ‘plague’,”
Fintan O’Toole - Edmund and the bastard
“It’s an extraordinary, dangerous bit of dramaturgy at that moment, but an atheistic Edmund creating mayhem in his world, leads people to beg the gods to intervene, almost, obsessively And I think Shakespeare really makes it clear that they don’t.”
Trevor Nunn - Edmund and the bastard
“Shakespeare very consciously places Edmund outside the domain of human morality in which heroes and villains exist and instead challenges is to accept him and the Nature he represents as a part of the order of the world, even as Edmund’s own society could not.”
Race Capet - Edmund and the bastard
“Edmund does not have a place in the world of the play, nor maintains residence in it. He appears here only temporarily, an intrusion into this world, as he is an intrusion to the family that acknowledges him without legitimising him and thus leaves him unable to inherit.”
Race Capet - Edmund and the bastard
“The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order.”
Jan Kott - The Fool
“The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.”
Jan Kott - The Fool
“It is the honour of these great characters to be culpable”
Hegel - paradoxes
“Unlike any other tragic protagonist, Lear has no soliloquys in the play. The Fool provides a means for Lear to use a more intimate and unguarded voice.”
Gillian Woods - The Fool and Lear’s madness
‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most’ (l.51)
Lear - language, relationships
‘Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again’ (l.90)
Lear - language
‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’ (l.91-92)
Cordelia - language, relationships
‘I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less’ (l.92-93)
Cordelia - language, relationships
