1_KING LEAR

1_KING LEAR

1. 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’
     • Lear breaks the bond of family and in doing he unleashes a breakdown in the basic categories of father and daughter, parent and child, man and woman
   • ‘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 bother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms’
   • ‘Edmund the base shall top the legitimate’
   • ‘legitimate Edgar I must 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’

2. NATURE

   • ‘Thou nature, art my goddess’
   • ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’
     • Those who have survived – Edgar, Albany and Kent – are, as Lear has been, just ruin’d pieces of nature
   • ‘Crack Nature’s moulds, all germans spill at once, / That makes ungrateful man’
   • ‘The tempest in my mind / Doth my senses take all feeling else / Save what beats there’
   • ‘the king falls from the bias of nature’
   • ‘We make guilty o four disasters the sun, the moon, the stars: villains, fools, knaves, thieves, adulterers, drunkards, liars by ‘spherical predominance’... enforced obedience of planetary influence... ‘heavenly compulsion’
     • This theme recurs ‘again and again with every shade of meaning and misunderstanding’
   • ‘Divisions in state, unnaturalness between child and parent’
   • ‘pitiless storm’
   • ‘the gods reward your kindness’
     • the animal imagery in King Lear is mostly used in derogatory terms to indicate the unnaturalness of the characters behaviour in comparison to how they should behave
   • ‘what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts’
   • ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport’
   • ‘wolfish visage’
   • ‘tigers not daughters’
   • Lear finds that his ‘frame of nature’ has been wretched ‘from the fixed place’
   • ‘a wretch whom nature is ashamed’

3. BLINDNESS

   • ‘All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men’
   • ‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes’
   • ‘What, art mad? A man may see how the world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears’
   • ‘Get thee glass eyes / And, like a scurvy politician, seem / To see things thou dost not’
     • 47 references to eyes in the play
   • ‘See better Lear: and let me still remain the true blank of thine eye'’
   • ‘O fond eyes / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck you out’
     • All is ‘dark and comfortless’
   • ‘Pluck out his poor old eyes’
   • ‘Out, vile jelly... let him smell / His way to Dover’
   • ‘I remember thine eyes well enough’
   • ‘The dark and vicious place where they got / Cost him his eyes’
   • ‘the youngest daughter does not love thee least’
   • ‘dost thou call me a fool boy?’ ‘All thy other titles thou has given away’
   • ‘darker purpose’
     • Lear, blinded by his obsession with the quantity of things, decides it must be nothing
   • ‘the truth, blank of thine eye’
     • Some Elizabethans thought that blinding was a good punishment for some crimes.
   • ‘out of my sight’
   • ‘Tis the times plague when madmen lead the blind’