King Lear

Example: Kent’s “See better, Lear” (Act 1, Scene 1); the blinded Gloucester’s “I stumbled when I saw.” (Act 4, Scene 1); the mad Lear’s claim that a man may see how the world goes “with no eyes”, and his “Look with thine ears.” (Act 4, Scene 6).

Effect: Seeing stands for understanding, and the play makes the metaphor literal. Lear cannot see Cordelia's love, and Gloucester cannot see Edmund's lies until he has lost his eyes. When Lear tells the blind man that he can still see how the world goes, Gloucester answers “I see it feelingly.”: knowledge now comes through suffering and touch, not sight. Lear takes the point further, that eyes are not needed at all. The paradox that the blind see is one of the play's bleakest consolations.

Example: In the storm Lear calls his clothes “lendings” and cries “Come, unbutton here.” (Act 3, Scene 4); in madness he sees that “Through tatter’d clothes great vices do appear; / Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.” (Act 4, Scene 6); dying, he asks “Pray you undo this button.” (Act 5, Scene 3).

Effect: Clothes are the borrowed signs of rank, and Lear strips them off to find “the thing itself”, the bare human being beneath. In Act 4 the image becomes social criticism: rich robes hide crimes that rags cannot. Check that line in your own copy: “great” is the Folio's word, but many editions, the Folger among them, print “small”, from the Quarto's “Through tattered rags small vices do appear”, which sharpens the contrast, since even small vices show through rags. The final button brings the pattern down to a single physical detail, and the stripping that began as a symbol ends as a real body in distress.

Example: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! blow!” (Act 3, Scene 2); a Gentleman reports that Lear “Strives in his little world of man to outscorn / The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.” (Act 3, Scene 1, in a passage found only in the Quarto).

Effect: Lear gives the weather orders in a string of imperatives, still speaking like a king, but the elements do not obey. The Gentleman's “little world of man” draws on the idea that a person is a small copy of the universe, so the chaos in Lear's mind, his family and his kingdom is echoed in the heavens. Lear even excuses the storm, “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.”, because it owes him nothing, unlike his daughters.

Example: Edmund: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.” (Act 1, Scene 2); Lear cursing Goneril: “Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!” (Act 1, Scene 4).

Effect: Both men pray to Nature as a goddess, but they mean opposite things. For Edmund, Nature is the raw force of appetite and ability, owing nothing to law or custom; for Lear, it is the order that binds children to fathers, which his daughters break. The critic John F. Danby built a whole reading of the play on these two natures. A strong essay notices that Lear's own curse, calling on Nature to make his daughter barren, is itself unnatural.

Example: Cordelia says she lacks “that glib and oily art” of her sisters, and Kent insists “To plainness honour’s bound / When majesty falls to folly.” (Act 1, Scene 1).

Effect: The play distrusts eloquence. Its honest characters speak bluntly and are punished for it, while flatterers are rewarded. But Shakespeare complicates the contrast: in Act 2, Scene 2 Cornwall mocks Kent's bluntness as a pose, “he cannot flatter, he, / An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth!”, and Edmund wins his father's trust with a show of reluctant honesty. The closing couplet's “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” reads as the lesson the whole play has paid for.

Example: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel;” and “All thy other titles thou hast given away;” (Act 1, Scene 4, the second in a passage found only in the Quarto); “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” (Act 1, Scene 5, where the Quarto has “before” for “till”).

Effect: As a licensed fool he may say what no courtier dares, provided it sounds like a joke. His jingles and riddles repeat one truth in many forms: Lear has given away his power and made his daughters his masters. The inversion is the point, since the fool is wise and the king foolish, and once Lear begins to speak truths in madness the Fool's work is done; he says his last line in Act 3, Scene 6.

Example: On the heath Lear questions Poor Tom in prose, “Is man no more than this?” (Act 3, Scene 4); in Act 4, Scene 6 his speech moves between prose and verse until Edgar cries “O, matter and impertinency mix’d! / Reason in madness!”

Effect: Blank verse is the language of the court and of self-command. Lear has already bantered with the Fool in prose, but on the heath and at Dover his prose is no longer play: it marks the breakdown of his order. Yet his mad speeches contain some of the sharpest criticism of power in the play, from “Ay, every inch a king.” to the dog “obeyed in office”. Edgar's phrase, reason in madness, is a useful name for the paradox: sense survives inside nonsense, and an essay can argue that Lear is wisest when least sane.

Example: As Poor Tom: “This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet:” (Act 3, Scene 4); as a peasant defending his father against Oswald: “Chill not let go, zir, without vurther ’casion.” (Act 4, Scene 6).

Effect: Edgar survives by becoming other people, and each disguise has its own voice. Some of Poor Tom's language, including the devil's name Flibbertigibbet, comes from Samuel Harsnett's attack on fraudulent exorcisms, published in 1603, so part of the madness Edgar performs is borrowed from a book exposing fake possession. The peasant's dialect makes him a nobody Oswald despises. When he answers the trumpet to fight Edmund he still hides his name, “Know my name is lost;”, while insisting, in the Folio, “Yet am I noble as the adversary”, and he claims it only after the fight: “My name is Edgar and thy father’s son.”

Example: Kent in the stocks: “Fortune, good night: smile once more, turn thy wheel!” (Act 2, Scene 2); Lear to Cordelia: “I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire,” (Act 4, Scene 7); the dying Edmund: “The wheel is come full circle; I am here.” (Act 5, Scene 3).

Effect: The medieval Wheel of Fortune carried people up to greatness and down to ruin, a reminder that worldly power does not last. Kent hopes it will turn upward; Lear turns it into a wheel of fire, an image of punishment; Edmund accepts that his rise has carried him round to his fall. The image gives the tragedy its shape in miniature.

Example: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” as Lear enters with Cordelia’s body, and later “Never, never, never, never, never!” (Act 5, Scene 3).

Effect: These are two different moments, a cry as he enters and a line as he dies, and the number of repetitions depends on your edition. This one prints four cries of “Howl”, as the 1608 Quarto does; the Folio, followed by the Folger and many other editions, has three. It prints five of “Never”, from the Folio; the Quarto has three. So count them in your own copy before you write a number. What does not change is the effect: at the height of grief, language shrinks to one word said again and again. “Never” is stressed on its first syllable, so the Folio's line is five trochees: ten syllables like a line of blank verse, but with the rhythm reversed. The world of the play has been turned upside down, and so has its metre.

Example: Edmund: “Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit; / All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.” (Act 1, Scene 2); the closing lines: “The weight of this sad time we must obey; / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” (Act 5, Scene 3).

Effect: Couplets close scenes on a maxim, giving a character's resolution the force of a proverb. Edmund's is a motto for self-made success at any cost. The final couplet asks for honest feeling in the most formal form the play has, which makes it sound both earned and strained. In the Folio Edgar speaks it; in the 1608 Quarto the closing lines are Albany's.