lear themes2

lear themes2

1. APPEARANCE/ REALITY

   • 'I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty / According to my bond; no more, no less' (Codelia's response to Lear)
   • 'The art of our necessities is strange, / That can make vile things precious'Lear in the hovel)
   • 'Filths savour by themselves. What have you done? Tigers not daughters, what have you performed?(Albany to Goneril, realising what they have done to Lear)
   • 'Yet Edmund was beloved' (Edmund, seeing Goneril and Regan dead)
   • 'I love you more than words can wield the matter... no less than life' (Goneril, feigning love to her father)

2. JUSTICE

   • ‘I am a man / More sinned against than sinning’ (Lear)
   • ‘And worse I may be yet; the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘this is the worst!’(Edgar, discovering Gloucester)
   • ‘I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself’(Gloucester, deciding against suicide)
   • ‘Thou shalt not die; / die for adultery! / Lot copulation thrive’ (Lear to Gloucester)
   • ‘I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead’ (Lear to Cordelia)
   • ‘The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us: / The dark and vicious place where you he got / Cost him his eyes’ (Edgar to Edmund)
   • ‘The wheel is come full circle; I am here’ (Edmund to Edgar at the end)
   • ‘This judgement of the heavens, that makes us tremble, / Touches us not with pity’ (Albany about Goneril and Regan's deaths)
   • ‘The gods defend her!’ (Albany on hearing Edmund's plot to hang Cordelia)
   • ‘He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer’(Kent on Lear's death)
   • ‘The gods... have preserved thee’(Edgar to Gloucester)

3. COMPASSION / RECONCILIATION

   • ‘No cause, no cause’ (Cordelia to Lear)
   • ‘So young and so untender?’(Lear); ‘So young my Lord, and true.’ (Cordelia)
   • ‘here I stand your slave / A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man’ (Lear, out in the storm)
   • ‘I have one part in my heart that’s sorry yet for thee’ (Lear to the fool out in the storm)
   • ‘My tears begin to take his part so much / They’ll mar my counterfeiting’ (Poor Tom, feeling sorry for Lear in the storm)
   • ‘Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The gods themselves throw incense’ (Lear,saying the gods admire her so much)
   • ‘his flawed heart / Alack! Too weak for the conflict to support; / Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly’ (Edgar on Gloucester's death)
   • ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (Edgar, final lines of the play)
   • Cordelia calls on ‘unpublish virtues of the earth’ to restore Lear

4. THE NATURAL ORDER

   • ‘Nothing will come of nothing’
   • ‘we shall retain / The name and all th’additon to a king’
   • ‘She is herself a dowry’
   • ‘Who still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away. Now by my life’
   • ‘All other titles thou hast given away’
   • ‘Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ the middle’
   • ‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’
   • ‘To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear’
   • ‘Our means secure us, and our mere defects’
   • ‘The stars above us govern our conditions’
   • ‘So horrid as in woman’
   • ‘There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit!’
   • ‘Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality’
   • ‘unaccommodated man is no more than a forked animal’
   • ‘A credulous father and a brother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms’
   • ‘Edmund the base shall top the legitimate’
   • ‘legitimate Edgar I shall have your land’
   • ‘who in the lusty stealth of nature take / More composition and fierce quality / Than doth within a dull stale bed’
   • ‘let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit’

5. NATURE

   • ‘Thou nature, art my goddess’ (Edmund)
   • ‘Blow, winds,and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ (Lear, out in the storm)
   • ‘Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once, / That make ingrateful man’ (Lear, out in the storm)
   • ‘The tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else / Save what beats there’ (Lear, out in the storm)
   • ‘the king falls from bias of nature -there's father against child’ (Gloucester about Lear)
   • ‘We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars:as if we were villains by necessity,.... ‘spherical predominance’... by an enforced obedience of planetary influence’ (Edmund)
   • ‘unnaturalness between the child and the parent’ (Edmund)
   • ‘pitiless storm’(Lear)
   • ‘the gods reward your kindness’ (Kent, thanking Gloucester for helping Lear)
   • ‘ see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’(Lear about Regan)
   • ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport’ (Gloucester about the gods)
   • 'She'll flay thy wolfish visage’ (Lear)
   • ‘tigers not daughters’ (Lear)
   • Lear finds that his ‘frame of nature’ has been wretched ‘from the fixed place’
   • ‘a wretch whom nature is ashamed’(Lear to France about Cordelia)

6. BLINDNESS

   • ‘All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men’ (Fool to Kent)
   • ‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes’ (Gloucester, contemplating suicide)
   • ‘What, art mad? A man may see how the world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears’ (Lear to Gloucester)
   • ‘Get thee glass eyes / And, like a scurvy politician, seem / To see things thou dost not’ (Lear to Gloucester)
     • 47 references to eyes in the play
   • ‘Out of my sight!’ (Lear) ‘See better Lear’ (Kent
   • ‘Old fond eyes / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out’ (Lear to Goneril, about his treatment)
     • All is ‘dark and comfortless’
   • ‘Pluck out his poor old eyes’(gloucester, to Regan, about how she treated Lear, and just before his own eyes are gouged
   • ‘Out, vile jelly':'let him smell / His way to Dover’ (Cornwall and Regan to Gloucester)
   • ‘I remember thine eyes well enough’ (Lear to the blind Gloucester)
   • ‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes’ (Edgar to Edmund at the end)
   • ‘the youngest daughter does not love thee least’(Kent to Lear)
   • ‘dost thou call me a fool boy?’ ‘All thy other titles thou has given away’ (Fool to Lear)
   • ‘Look with thine ears’ (Lear, to Gloucester, saying he doesn't need eyes to understand)
   • ‘darker purpose’ (Lear)
   • ‘the true, blank of thine eye’ (Kent to Lear)
   • ‘out of my sight’ (Lear to Kent)
   • ‘Tis the times plague when madmen lead the blind’ (Gloucester to the old man,after losing his eyes)

7. PARENT / CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

   • ‘Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea monster’ (Lear)
   • ‘Create her child of spleen, that it may live / And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her... that she may feel / How sharper than the serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!’ (Lear)
   • ‘I pray thee, daughter, do not make me mad’ (Lear)
   • ‘But I shall see / The winged vengeance overtake such children’ (Gloucester)
   • ‘Which one of you shall we say doth love us most?’ (Lear)
   • ‘I have often blushed to acknowledge him’ (Gloucester)
   • ‘there was good sport at his making and the whoreson must be acknowledged.’ (Gloucester)
   • ‘Here I disclaim my paternal care’ (Lear)
   • ‘her price has fallen’ (Lear)
   • ‘Better thou / Had’st not been born than not to have pleased me better’(Lear)
   • ‘he always loved our sister most’ (Goneril)
   • ‘Why bastard? Wherefore base? / When my dimensions are as well compact, / My mind as generous, and my shape as true / As honest madam’s issue? / Why brand they us / With base? With baseness? bastardy? base, base?’ (Edmund's soliloquy)
   • ‘there’s son against father: the king falls from the bias of nature; there’s father against child’ (Gloucester)
   • ‘Divisions in state, unnaturalness between child and parent’ (Edmund)
   • ‘Into her womb convey sterility!’ (Lear)
   • ‘You heaven – if it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts’ (Lear)
   • ‘No, you unnatural hags, / I will have such revenges on you both / That all the world shall – I will do such things – / What they are, I know not – but they shall be / The terrors of the earth... No, I’ll not weep’ (Lear)
   • ‘How dost my boy?’(Lear)
   • ‘When we our betters see bearing our woes / We scarcely think our miseries foes. / he childed as I father’d’ (Poor Tom)
   • ‘I gave you all, made you my guardian’ (Lear)
   • ‘I did her wrong’ (Lear, realising his folly)
   • ‘in my corrupted blood’ (Lear)
   • ‘a disease that’s in my flesh’ (Lear)
   • ‘the younger rises when the old doth fall’ (Edmund)
   • ‘Thou hast power to shake my manhood’ (Lear)

8. CLOTHING / NAKEDNESS

   • ‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm’ (Lear, gaining humility in the storm)
   • ‘Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of the silks betray thy poor heart to woman’ (Poor Tom to Lear)
   • ‘You, sir – I entertain you for one of my hundred; only I do not like the fashion of your garments’ (Lear to Poor Tom in the hovel)
   • ‘And bring some covering for this naked soul’ (Lear on discovering Poor Tom)
   • ‘Robes and furr’d gowns hide all’ (lear to Gloucester)
   • ‘Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume... thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come, unbutton here’ (Lear, casting off his clothes in the storm)

9. BETRAYAL

   • ‘In palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ‘twist son and father’ (Gloucester)
   • ‘Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves’ (Gloucester)
   • ‘If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts / Against their father, fool me not so much / To bear it tamely’ (Lear about the gods)
   • ‘Of Gloucester’s treachery / And of the loyal service of his son’ (Oswald)
   • ‘Edmund, I arrest thee / On capital treason; and, in thine attaint / This gilded serpent’ (Albany)
   • ‘If none appear to prove upon thy person / Thy heinous, manifest and many treasons’ (Albany challenges Edmund)

10. MADNESS

    • ‘O, let not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’ (Lear, losing his mind)
    • ‘I prithee,daughter, do not make me mad’(Lear to Goneril, after she reduces his men)
    • ‘O fool, I shall go mad’(Lear to the fool, going out to the tempest)
    • ‘Enter Edgar disguised as a madman’ (Poor Tom, in the hovel)
    • ‘Thou say’st the King grows mad: I’ll tell thee, friend, / I am almost mad myself’ (Gloucester)
    • ‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind’ (Gloucester, after losing his eyes)
    • ‘O, matter and impertinency mix’d! / Reason, in madness’(Edgar,seeing Lear 'mad')
    • ‘You see how full of changes his age is. The observation we have made of it hath not beenlittle’(Goneril, about Lear, once she has secured her share)
    • ‘Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself’(Regan, after securing the land)
    • ‘Idle old man / that still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away. Now by my life / Old fools are babes again’ (Goneril,about Lear)
    • ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (Lear) ‘Lear’s shadow’(The Fool's reply)
    • ‘Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise’ (Fool, saying Lear lacks wisdom)
    • ‘Sir, you are old... You should be ruled and led’(Regan, telling Lear to go back to Goneril's house)
    • ‘My wits begin to turn’ (Lear)
    • ‘O! Matter and impertinency mixed! Reason in madness!’ (Edgar,seeing Lear towards the end)
    • ‘I fear I am not in my perfect mind’ (Lear to Cordelia, not recognising her)
    • ‘in ill thoughts again’ (Edgar,to Gloucester, after the battle is lost)
    • ‘the grief hath crazed my wits’ (Gloucester, trying to understand why Edgar is 'trying' to kill him)
    • ‘The tempest in my mind’ (Lear, out in the storm)