King Lear Quotes Flashcards
Lear
Gods and Justice
Act 2 Scene 2 after Goneril and Regan have betrayed him
‘Show obedience, if you yourselves are old, Make it your cause. Send down, and take my part’.
Lear is asking the gods to take his side and punish Goneril and Regan.
Edmund
We get what we deserve
Act 5 Scene 3
‘The wheel is come full circle’.
Edmund has been mortally wounded and says he got what he deserves. But does he deserve death?
Albany
Friends and Foes deservings
Act 5 Scene 3
‘All friends shall taste the wages of their virtue and all foes the cup of their deservings’. Explains why Edgar and Kent get to rule. However, this statement seems out of place as Lear just carried dead Cordelia onto the stage.
Edgar
Gods are just
Act 5 Scene 3
‘The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us’.
Gloucester and Edmund are both punished for their vices.
- ‘plague’ biblical connotations of 10 plagues of Egypt- Exodus
- oxymoron of ‘pleasant vices’. Pleasant immorality
- ‘the gods are just’ suggests he is trying to convince himself to believe it so that he can go to heaven
Gloucester
The gods
Famous quote
Act 4 Scene 1
‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport’.
- simile
- ‘wanton boys’ suggests they are spiteful, immature.
- ‘The gods are indifferent to human suffering and kill easily.’
- ‘sport’ associated with Gloucester at beginning
Kent
Wheel of Fortune
Act 2 Scene 2
‘Fortune, good night, smile once more, turn thy wheel’
Edgar
Last lines of the play
‘The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long.
- royal ‘we’ evades closure but also suggests authority
- compare to Shakespeare’s other tragedies endings; ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Hamlet’. They all have a sense of closure and moving forwards
Kent
Lear is dead
Act 5 Scene 3
‘Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.’
- harsh sounds ‘t’, ‘s’ and ‘ck’
- rack was a torture instrument
‘Her voice
‘was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’
Lear after Cordelia’s death
5.3
- soft tone
- A04 expectations of women
‘Is this the promised end?’
‘Or image of that horror?’
Kent and Edgar as Lear brings Cordelia’s body
5.3
- not rhythmic. Shows chaos, uncertainty
- ‘promised end’ is Judgement Day
‘I fear I am not’
‘in my perfect mind’
Lear with Cordelia and Doctor
4.7
- returning to clarity
- ‘fear’ suggests he is concerned, starting to have rational feelings again
- doesn’t use royal ‘we’, self recognition
‘When we are born
‘we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’
Lear- stage of life
4.6
-metatextual: play talking about a play
‘Through tatter’d clothes
‘small vices do appear robes and furr’d gowns hide all’
Lear
4.6
- tone is rough for ‘tatter’d’ but smooth for ‘robes and furr’d’. The rich are corrupt and can cover it up with money
- clothes is a metaphor for money
- links to Lear in 3 iv when Lear takes off his clothes, symbolising he is getting rid if his corrupt past
‘The worst is not’
‘so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’’
Edgar
4.1
- superlative ‘worst’
- black humour
- ‘o’ sounds, sonorous, deep sound
‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;’
‘I stumbled when I saw’
Gloucester
4.1
-physically seeing vs mental knowledge. Life doesn’t take you anyway
‘The prince of darkness’
‘is a gentleman’
Edgar talking about the devil
3.4
‘Poor Tom’s’
‘a cold’
Edgar
3.4
‘expose thyself
to feel what wretches feel’
Lear
3.4
‘Poor naked wretches,
‘wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm. How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you from seasons such as these?’
Lear
3.4
‘The art
‘of our necessities is strange that can make vile things precious’
Lear
When you’re desperate everything seems precious
3.2
‘A poor, infirm, weak
and despised old man’
Lear
3.2
‘Blow,
‘and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’
Lear
3.2
‘Allow not nature
more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s’
Lear
2.4
‘O! Let me not be mad,
not mad, sweet heaven; Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!
Lear
1.5
‘How sharper
‘than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’
Lear
1.4
‘Now gods,’
‘Stand up for bastards!’
Edmund
1.2
‘Fairest Cordelia’
‘that art most rich, being poor’
France
1.1
‘Nothing
will come of nothing’
Lear
1.1
‘I want that glib (shallow) and oily art’
‘to speak and purpose not’
Cordelia
1.1
‘Mend your speech a little’
‘Lest it may mar your fortunes’
Lear (to Cordelia- she should change what she says to him or she will lose her inheritance)
1.1
‘Some good
‘I mean to do despite of my own nature’
Edmund
5.3 when he tries to save Lear and Cordelia before they are murdered by a soldier
‘Yet Edmund
‘was beloved’
Edmund
5.3 looking at Goneril and Regan’s dead bodies
‘Yet was his mother fair;’
‘there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.’
Gloucester
1.1 Talking about Edmund and his mother
‘Unaccommodated man is no more’
‘but such a poor, bare, forked animal’
Lear
3.4
‘I cannot heave
my heart into my mouth’
Cordelia
1.1
Lear’s question to Goneril
1.4
‘Are you our daughter?’
royal ‘we’
Lear realises his actions to Cordelia
1.5
‘I did her wrong’
Edgard disguising himself as ‘Poor Tom’
2.3
‘Edgar I nothing am’.
Meaning he is no longer Edgar and he is nothing
thou art my flesh,
my blood, my daughter—
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh’
Lear to Goneril
2.4
Lear describes Goneril as ‘a boil,
a plague-sore’
2.4
‘I will do such things—
/ What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be/ The terrors of the earth!’ [storm and tempest]
Lear to Goneril and Regan. Thunder rumbles after he says it.
2.4
‘I am a man more
sinned against than sinning’
Lear
3.2
‘the younger rises
when the old doth fall’
Edmund
3.4
‘I shall see
/ The winged vengeance overtake such children’
Gloucester to Regan and Cornwall
3.7
‘Out,
vile jelly!’
Cornwall taking out Gloucester’s eye
3.7
‘Tis the time’s
plague when madmen lead the blind’
Gloucester
4.1
‘Not blown ambition
doth our arms incite / but love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’
Cordelia brought an army for France because of her love for her father, not because she wants power
4.4
‘Thy life’s
a miracle!’
Edgar (in disguise) to Gloucester after he ‘falls’
4.6
‘I know you do not
love me, for your sisters / have, as I remember, done me wrong. / You have some cause, they have not.’
Lear to Cordelia when they’re reunited
‘No cause
no cause’
Cordelia saying she had no reason to do Lear wrong
4.7
‘so often blushed
to acknowledge him, that now I am brazed to it’
Gloucester about his embarrassment of Edmund. ‘Brazed’ means to join metal together by soldering at a high temperature’.
1.1
‘yet no dearer
in my account’
Gloucester saying he does not favour Edgar even though he is legitimate
1.1
‘To both these sisters
have I sworn my love… Which of them shall I take? / Both? One? Or neither?’
Edmund
5.1
‘We two alone
will sing like birds i’the’cage’
Simile- Lear to Cordelia about prison
5.3
‘A plague upon you
murderers, traitors all!’
Lear after Cordelia’s death
5.3
‘That from your first
of difference and decay Have followed your sad steps.’
Kent- commitment to Lear
5.3
‘There’s hell,
there’s darkness, there’s the sulfurous pit— burning, scalding, stench, consumption!’
Lear on women
4.5
Lear’s description of Edgar
3
‘the basest and most poorest shape’
‘philosopher’
‘unaccommodated man’
Lear’s last words
‘Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips, Look there, look there!’
‘I love your majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.’
Cordelia
‘I grow;
I prosper’
Edmund
‘The dark and
vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.’
Edgar about Gloucester’s adultery and punishment
‘idle
old man’
Goneril about Lear
‘Which of you shall
we say doth love us most?’
Lear
Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Fool’s reply…
‘Lear’s shadow’
Either the Fool (as he ‘shadows’ Lear wherever he goes) or Lear who is now nothing but a shadow without his title and power
Lear describes Goneril and Regan as
‘Pernicious daughters’ (harmful affect)
Goneril’s flattery to Lear
‘Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty’
[Aside] ‘What shall Cordelia do?
Love, and be silent.’
Goneril to Albany
‘milky gentleness’
Lady Macbeth accuses her husband of being “too full o’ the milk of human kindness”
‘Why have my sisters husbands,
if they say / they love you all?’
Cordelia
1.1
Lear was going to depend on Cordelia’s _______
1.1
‘kind nursery’
‘These late eclipses
in the sun and moon portend no good to us’
Gloucester- disasters come after eclipses
‘Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither.
Ripeness is all.’
Lear
You can’t choose your time of death any more than your time of birth. We live and die when our time comes.
- ‘ripeness is all’ links to ‘Waiting for Godot’
- links to Jan Kott’s interpretation ‘there is nothing’
- deliberately Pagan so that he won’t be put in the Tower
