quotes :P Flashcards
(11 cards)
‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!’- King Lear
- Madness and betrayal
- The Storm. As Lear wanders about a desolate heath in Act 3, a terrible storm, strongly but ambiguously symbolic, rages overhead. In part, the storm echoes Lear’s inner turmoil and mounting madness
- Symbols of weather
- Chaos and disintergration: the storm parallels Britain’s fall into political chaos.Lear has divided his kingdom, civil war is brewing
- Lear is being treated bad by his daughters
‘Truths a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the branch may, stand by the fire and stink’-The Fool
- Madness and betrayal
- The metaphor defames Lear’s judgment, implying that Lear has chastised a metaphorical dog of truth, Cordelia, in favor of flattery, Goneril and Regan. The Fool further serves to emphasize Lear’s foolishness when he warns against Goneril and Regan:
- The Animal Imagery used in King Lear is constantly used to describe situations, people and behaviors
Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood-King Lear
- Madness and betrayal
- When Lear goes off on Goneril, he insists she’s more like a “disease that’s in [his] flesh” than a daughter (his “flesh and blood”).
- The kingdom was used as a metaphor for the human body. When Lear imagines that his body is diseased, we can’t help but notice that his kingdom is also not doing so well.
- Rejecting his own ‘diseased’ blood
Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; Age is unecessary-Lear
- Themes of old age
- When Regan accusses Lear of being unable to percieve his elderly age
- Older people seem to unwise/ have little purpose in the play
I am a very foolish, fond old man fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; And to deal plainly, I fear I’m not in my perfect mind-Lear
-Self knowledge/blindness
-Alliteration
-Authority and order
-When Lear recovers from his madness
He finally describes himself accurately without rage, madness, boasting or any attempt to wield his long vanished royal power
-Redemptive moment
-Themes of old age
Nothing will come of nothing- Lear
- he tells Cordelia to “Speak again.” When he asks his daughters how much they love him
- “Nothing can come of nothing” is a variation on the famous phrase “ex nihilo nihil fit” – that’s Latin for “from nothing, nothing comes,” (themes of nihilism and nothingness)
- Repetition of nothing highlights this idea
The Fool calls the retired king “Lear’s shadow,”
Symbolises that Lear without his crown, is merely a shadow of his former self. The idea is that Lear, (whose status has changed since retirement) is nothing without his former power and title.
-Authority- nothingness
Whos Poor Tom and what does he symbolise
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Poor Tom—a figure of madness, poverty, and linguistic play—acts as the personification of the semi-apocalyptic state into which the social world of the play descends.
-Edgar in disguise
man is nothing more than “a poor bare, forked animal”
- When Edgar disguises himself as “Poor Tom,” he chooses to disguise himself as a naked beggar.
- Then, in the big storm scene, Lear strips off his kingly robes.
- Lear has seen Poor Tom (naked) and asks, “Is man no more than this?”
- Donning rich and opulent clothing (like Goneril and Regan do), is a futile attempt to disguise man’s true, defenseless nature.
- Nakedness vs Clothing
- nothingness
- Ask about the aesthetic feature of this
I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond; no more, no less-Cordelia
-Cordelia offers her father a truthful evaluation of her love for him: she loves him “according to my bond”;
-Cannot heave her heart into her mouth symbolises:
Her integrity prevents her from making a false declaration in order to gain his wealth.
-Motifs of blindness, tragedy
“Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever.”-lear
- the stars, heavens and Gods
- nothingness, children and parent relationships
