Lear Quotes Flashcards
Edmund is a bastard
‘[…]a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault?’
‘[…]this knave came something saucily to the world[…]’
Lear wants to retire
‘To shake all cares and business from our age[…] while we crawl unburdened toward death.’
Goneril loves Daddy
‘Dearer than eyesight, space or liberty, beyond what can be valued, rich or rare[…]’
Regan loves Daddy
‘Which the most precious square of sense possesses.’
Cordelia’s spoken love.
‘Nothing, my lord.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
[…]
‘I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.’
Lear is incredulous
‘How, nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.’
Cordelia insinuates her sister have Electra-complexes.
‘Why have my sisters husands, if they say they love you all?’
Lear is furious…with everyone.
‘Thy truth then be thy dower[…]’
‘Peace, Kent, Come not between a dragon and his wrath!’
Oh, France, you old romantic!
‘Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor.’
Edmund is a little shit.
‘Nature, art my goddess.’
Edmund is illegitimate and this upsets him, like the little bitch he is.
‘Why brand they us with base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?’
Edmund calls on God to help him
‘Edmund the base shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper: Now gods, stand up for bastards.’
The Fool talks about the silly old cuckoo bird.
‘The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo too long that it’s had it head bit off by it young’
Lear has a senior dementia moment (Very silly)
‘Who is it who can tell me who I am?’
‘Lear’s shadow.’
Lear is cross that Goneril touched his no-no area
‘I am ashamed that thou hast power to shake my manhood thus[…]’
The Fool thinks Lear is old
‘Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.’
Gloucester’s old heart is frail and fragile.
‘my old heart is cracked, it’s cracked.’
Kent is all sad that Cordelia isn’t there because the realm is falling apart and he is madly in lurve with Lear.
‘Take vantage, heavy eyes, not to behold this shameful lodgings’
Edgar becomes Poor Thomas, or Tom for short.
‘Edgar I nothing am.’
The Fool fails to take his own worldly advice.
‘When a wise man gives thee better council give me mine again; I would have none but knaves follow it since a fool gives it.’
Lear is angry with Cornwall. So angry, that he could become dragon-like again.
My breath and blood! Fiery?
Lear bitches about Goneril to Regan
‘Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture’
‘Struck me with her tongue most serpent-like’
‘Into her scornful eyes, infect her beauty[…]’
Regan has betrayed Lear and demands he returns with Goneril
‘You will return and sojourn with my sister.’
‘Return with her?’ x 3
Lear gets all flesh, blood and paternalistic.
‘But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter, or rather the disease that’s in my flesh.’
‘Thou art a boil, a plague sore, or an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.’
Regan is being an unreasonable bitch
‘I gave you all - ‘
‘And in good time you gave it.’
It’s not about needs, it’s about wants.
‘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’
Lear threatens the sisters.
‘You unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall - I will do such things - what they are yet I know not, but they shall e the terrors of the earth!’
Lear’s heart breaks.
‘[…] but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad.’
The front door
Shut up your doors
Lear is driven mad by the weather (storm)
‘Storm still’
‘Blow wind and crack your cheecks! Rage, blow!’
‘Spit fire, spout rain!’
‘Crack nature’s moulds’
Lear is hurt by everyone
‘I am a man more sinned against than sinning’
Lear is becoming increasingly humble and embraces his fragility.
‘Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’
Lear is kind to the Fool
‘Come on, my boy. How dost my boy? Art cold?’
Edmund thinks that Gonny, Reggie and Cornwallis’ meeting is…
‘Most savage and unnatural’
Edmund is a treacherous bastard.
‘shall the Duke instantly know and of that letter too.’
‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’
Lear is upset with his children
‘filial ingratitude’
Lear takes pity upon the poor
‘Poor naked wretches’
‘How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides[…] defend you from seasons such as these?’
Poor Tom is a degenerate
‘Wine I loved deeply, dice dearly; and, in women, out-paramoured the Turk’
Lear takes a liking to his ‘Philosopher’ Tom
‘Noble philosopher’
‘I will keep still with my philosopher.’
‘Come, good Athenian’
Edgar makes a reference
‘Fie, foh, fum, I smell the blood of a British man.’
Cornwall makes crazy-old Edmund into Gloucester
‘True or false, it hath made thee Earl of Gloucester’
Lear holds a mock trial
‘warped looks proclaim what store her heart is made on’
‘let them anatomise Regan’
Fool’s last line
‘And I’ll go to bed at noon’ - salsify flower.
Edgar is sorrowful for Lear
‘When that which makes me bend makes the King bow’
The servant is killed.
‘O, I am slain. My lord, you have one eye left to see some mischief on him’
Gloucester realises his error
‘The Edgar was abused? Kind Gods, forgive me that and prosper him.’
To Dover with Gloucester.
‘Go, thrust him out at gates and let him smell his way to Dover.’
Cornwall fucking dies
‘Regan, I bleed apace[…]’
Edgar works it all out, that maybe being poor isn’t so bad after all.
‘To be worst, the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune[…] lamentable change is from the best, the worst returns to laughter.’
Edgar notices Gloucester
‘My father, poorly led?’
Gloucester has no eyes
‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw.’
‘Might I but live to see thee in my touch, I’d say I had eyes again.’
Gloucester is depressed and angry with the gods
‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.’
Gonorrhea and Edmund are in lurve.
‘She places a chain about his neck.’
‘This kiss, if it durst speak, would stretch thy spirits up into the air.’
Gonny and Alby argue over whose the shitest little bitch
‘Tigers not daughters’
‘Milk-livered man’
‘See thyself, devil: proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in woman’
Cordelia is a secular pieta
‘Sunshine and rain at once, her smiles and tears.’
‘As pearls from diamonds drop[…]’
‘The holy water from her heavenly eyes.’
Cordelia is Joan of Ark-like
‘Enter with drums and colours Cordelia, Gentlemen, [Officer] and soldiers.’
‘But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’
Lear is Christ-like
‘As mad as the vexed sea[…] crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds[…]’
Regan is a paranoid bitch.
‘Let me unseal the letter.’
Gloucester intends suicide
‘This world I do renounce and in your sights shake patiently my great affliction off.’
Lear is mad and it makes Gloucester quit his bitching
‘Thou shalt not die - die for adultery. No!’
‘Let copulation thrive.’
Gloucester is happy Lear is there, Lear doesn’t really know who he is.
‘O, let me kiss that hand!’
‘Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality’
Oswald is killed
‘Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain take my purse[…]’
Cordelia kisses Lear.
‘Let this kiss repair those violent harms that my two sisters have in thy reverence made.’
Lear is now a kinder man, he has hit his anaganorsis
‘I am a foolish, fond old man.’
‘I think this lady to be my child Cordelia.’
‘The great rage you see is killed in him.’
Gonny is jelly
‘I had rather lose the battle than that sister should loosen him and me.’
Edmund is a pillock.
‘Each jealous of the other as the stung are of the adder. Which one shall I take? Both? One? Or neither?’
Edgar’s aphorism.
‘Ripeness is all’
Lear gets incestuous as they are dragged off to prison.
‘We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage.’
Gonny poisoned Reggie
‘Sick, O, sick!’
‘If not, I’ll never trust medicine.’
Edgar comes out.
‘My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son.’
Edmund has not been favoured by fortune
‘The wheel is come full circle, I am here.’
Edgar tells of poor, dead Gloucester.
‘Met I my father with his bleeding rings their precious stones new lost.’
‘But his flawed heart, Alack, too weak the conflict to support, ‘twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, burst smilingly.’
Edmund was joined to all sisters.
‘I was contacted to them both; all three married in an instant.’
Lear is sad
‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’
‘She’s dead as earth’
‘And my poor fool is hanged.’
‘No, no, no life!’
‘Look on her: look, her lips, look there, look there!’
Everyone is sad
‘Is this the promised end?’
‘Break, heart, I prithee break.’
‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go, my master calls me and I must not say no.’
Edgar’s last little speech.
‘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.’
