King Lear Class Quotes

Thou, Nature, art my goddess. To thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? 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,"
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed
Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, "legitimate."
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2. In this soliloquy Edmund says that the only laws he shows loyalty to are the laws of nature, exposing him as a moral nihilist and one of the play’s evil villains. The proud and resentful Edmund laments his "base" status as the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester. He questions the injustice of customs that deprive bastards like him of the birthright given to legitimate sons like his half-brother Edgar. Edmund, who does not feel bound by legal rules, shows his determination to set things right regarding this. Scheming for power, he plots to take Edgar’s legitimate inheritance of "land" – the Gloucester property and position. The letter referred to in his "bastard" speech is one Edmund forged implicating Edgar in a plot against Gloucester and which Edmund is about to present to father to trick him.

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?

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2. Edmund asks why society calls him bastard and why is he therefore worthless? He is as sound in mind and body as any legitimate child, he insists. Edmund believes that he is treated unfairly, made feel inferior and wrongly deprived of his inheritance because of his bastard status. His pride is also injured.

Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ‘tween asleep and wake?

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2. Edmund sells us the good side of being the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester. He takes pride in the fact that bastards like him are conceived in a moment of passionate and natural lust. He sees bastards as superior in composition and quality than the whole tribe of "fops" (silly kids) legitimately conceived by half asleep parents in a tedious, stale bed.

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, "legitimate."
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2. The Machiavellian Edmund has a lot in common with Lear’s villainous daughters Goneril and Regan – the capacity for duplicity! While the sisters fool Lear with deceptive expressions of love, Edmund forges a letter to trick his father the Earl of Gloucester and falsely accuse his innocent abrother Edgar. Edmund notes that his father loves him as much as his legitimate son, but he is unhappy that as a bastard he stands to inherit nothing. However, Edmund pledges that through his scheme to discredit his brother he will enjoy prosperity, triumph over the honest Edgar and take his inheritance. Edmund feels no loyalty to his family and believes he is entitled to the Gloucester wealth and title.

Put on what weary negligence you please,
You and your fellows. I’d have it come to question.
If he distaste it, let him to my sister,
Whose mind and mine I know in that are one,
Not to be overruled. Idle old man
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away. Now, by my life,
Old fools are babes again and must be used
With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused.
Remember what I have said.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 3. Goneril’s evil intent and wicket behavior towards her retired father can be seen when she instructs the servant Oswald to be rude and less polite to Lear. She calls him a foolish old man, who believes he can still wield the power that he has given away. Old fools become like babies again, she points out to Oswald, and they must be disciplined instead of flattered when they are misguided.

LEAR: What art thou?
KENT: A very honest-hearted fellow, and as poor as the King.
LEAR: If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he is for a king, thou art poor enough. What wouldst thou?
KENT: Service.
LEAR: Who wouldst thou serve?
KENT: You.
LEAR: Dost thou know me, fellow?
KENT: No, sir, but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4. After Lear banishes his devoted servant Kent, the Earl finds an inventive way to get back into employment in the service of Lear, when he disguises himself as "Caius."

That lord that counsell’d thee
To give away thy land,
Come place him here by me;
Do thou for him stand.
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear:
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4. The Fool with his clever use of witty rhyme points out to King Lear the foolishness of giving away his kingdom. He calls himself the "sweet" fool and Lear the "bitter fool." In his wise but acerbic advice the Fool is able to cut through the social class barrier of King and humble subject to tell Lear the error of his ways. He enjoys a special place in the King’s court and can get away with this.

A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2. Shakespeare was master without parallel of the stinging insult and poisonous put down. Here Kent picks a fight with Goneril’s steward Oswald and uses colorful language to insult him in a variety of ways. In one of the bard’s best insulting passages, Kent does a demolition job on Osward, branding him a knave and rogue, proud and lily-livered, a "pander" (pimp) and son of a bitch! The Earl’s scalding-hot torrent of invective is also full of references to Oswald’s low social status and social climbing – his servant’s three suits, his filthy worsted stockings and playing the "bawd" (woman in charge of a brothel) to please his masters.

This is some fellow
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he.
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth!
An they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly-ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2. Cornwall calls into question Kent’s true nature and his real motivation behind the honest and plain speaking that he prides himself for. Accusing Kent of duplicity, he suggests that his bluntness is just a "garb" and strategy to conceal his real intentions. Kent is not able to flatter, says Cornwall, but his "garb" of honest speech hides more craftiness and dishonest purpose than is seen in twenty bootlicking servants who bow and flatter. Cornwall is not completely off the mark in calling Kent a deceiver. For the Earl of Kent is disguised here as the commoner Caius – Cornwall is not aware of this, but the audience is, making this a good example of dramatic irony.

I heard myself proclaimed,
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place
That guard and most unusual vigilance
Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may ‘scape,
I will preserve myself, and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury in contempt of man
Brought near to beast.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 3. Having fled his father’s castle and hearing himself declared an outlaw, Edgar has fled to the wilderness and realizes that no port or road is safe for him. He may seem gullible and a bit of a fool, having been so easily duped by brother Edmund, but Edgar the fugitive quickly finds a smart solution to his problem. He plans to save himself by taking on the disguise of a fool and a beggar. He will reinvent himself as the filthiest, lowliest beggar that was ever hated by man, he says.

My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars who with roaring voices
Strike in their numbed and mortifièd arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,
And, with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. "Poor Turlygod! Poor Tom!"
That’s something yet. "Edgar" I nothing am.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 3. In the woods Edgar plans to disguise himself as a deranged inmate of Bedlam hospital called Poor Tom. He will smear his face with mud, strip himself, wear only a blanket and brave the wind, bad weather and natural elements almost naked. He has seen beggars from insane asylums mutilate their arms with pins and nails, pray and shout insane curses, forcing poor villagers and farmers to give them alms. Poor Tom, they call themselves. He is no longer Edgar, he announces, renouncing his family identity.

GONERIL: Hear me, my lord.
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN: What need one?

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 4. Lear starts off his retirement with an entourage of one hundred knights to attend him. Daughters Goneril and Regan first demand that he get rid of fifty, then in this passage they go so far as to suggest that he doesn’t need any at all. They are conspiring against Lear because they fear that he might use the knights against them to assert his authority again as King. Any power Lear may think he has left is rapidly disappearing. He is King without a kingdom, he may soon be a master without servants.

O, reason not the need! our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 4. This is Lear’s response when Goneril and Regan questions why he needs his retinue of knights. Lear declares that need is not the point, the poorest beggars have at least something they don’t need. If you only allow people what they need to survive – "allow not nature more than nature needs" – then man’s life is no better than an animal’s. Lear is railing against the injustice of it all. The passage also foreshadows that Lear with soon be living alongside the poorest beggars.

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4. Being homeless now himself, Lear shows some compassion for the vulnerability of the homeless and poor in the terrible storm. Prior to this he had never really thought about their plight. But in the storm he is learning to empathize with those at the bottom of society. He acknowledges that as King when he had the power and authority to effect social change he could have done more for them. Men who live in luxury should expose themselves to what the poor and homeless feel, he declares, so they can give their surplus wealth to them and make the world a more just place.

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. Ha! here’s three on ‘s are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4. Astonished at the sight of Poor Tom (Edgar), who is practically naked and wearing just a blanket to cover his loins, Lear shows considerable sympathy for him. In one of the biggest and most profound questions of the play, Lear asks, is this all a man is? Looking at Edgar, the man without possessions, "a poor, bare, forked animal," Lear then proceeds to tear off his own clothes and be on the same level as a beggar, identifying with Poor Tom. This scene shows how far Lear has fallen from his high social status and powerful position as King. There is a nihilistic tone of hopelessness to Lear’s words and mood here, as he sees man (and himself) stripped of possessions and family and reduced to a poor naked animal. In the line before this quote he says you would be better off dead than face the violent storm with just your naked body – "Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies." The storm of course being a symbol of Lear’s inner turmoil.

Heavens, deal so still:
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly.
So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1. Here Gloucester gives the disguised Edgar a purse as he speaks about the redistribution of wealth and justice for the poor. Gloucester talks about the spoiled and gluttonous man who has everything but can’t see the misery around him because he doesn’t feel it himself. He should be made feel the anger of the gods, he says, so that excess wealth would be redistributed until everyone has enough to live on.

Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?…
And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 4, Scene 6. This passage is part of Lear’s tirade against authority and the abuse of power. Like most of what he says to Gloucester in this scene, the words are the ramblings and pontifications of a crazy man dressed in weeds and flowers. But they make a lot of sense and contain much wisdom and truth. For Lear has gained self-knowledge through his own suffering and madness. He has learned about the nature of power, something he possessed in abundance and lost. He has a better understanding of the nature of justice and society and power, which eluded him when he ruled as King. In this passage he concludes that authority is just a sham. Even a dog can take up an office of power and is obeyed by people because they fear being bitten. He is now revolted by the very thing that he has been, King of Britain, and sees himself as no different to a farmer’s dog barking at a beggar. Lear is going through a radical metamorphosis from the ignorant, arrogant Lear the King to a more self-aware Lear the man, who has empathy for the poor and dispossessed – the "little" people. In saying how even a dog can come to rule with brute force, he may be commenting on his daughters Goneril and Regan. Lear has already used some uncomplimentary animal images and insults to describe them ("like a vulture," "unnatural hags") and so has Kent ("dog-hearted") and Albany ("monsters of the deep").

Through tattered clothes small vices do appear.
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 4, Scene 6. Continuing his passionate attack on human justice, Lear says to Gloucester that the rich can afford to use the facade of robes and furred gowns to conceal their true intentions and deceit. He paints an image of the false and hypocritical justice enjoyed and operated by the rich and powerful. In this world justice is dependant on social class and power. In his madness and misery Lear has a heightened understanding of how justice operates in his kingdom. He realizes the hypocrisy of his court, where money and power can conceal wrongdoing and injustice.
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