King Lear character key quotes - LEAR

‘We shall express our darker purpose’

Royal ‘we’ - arrogance in his power as King.

Imagery of darkness - creates a foreboding, intense mood and foreshadows deciet and evil to come as he descends into madness.

Themes: Kingship, Power, Deciet, Fate vs. Free will

‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’

Royal ‘we’ - arrogance, speaking for the country, inappropriate for a king (- perhaps corruption?). Also, creates ambiguity, ‘we’ with the people or the gods? (AO3: Chain of Being and King as God’s representative on earth)

Quantifying Love - shallow flattery

Themes: ‘Nothing’, Kingship, Deceit, corruption and disease.

‘WIth shadowy forests and with champains rich, with plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads’

Imagery of wealth, nature and abundance - Quantifying love, making room for corruption in deceit and flattery he is blind to, depicting his utter naivity

Themes: ‘Nothing’, Kingship, Blindness, Madess(?)

‘Nothing will come of nothing’

Insight into his value of flattery and tangible evidence of emotions.

Themes: ‘Nothing’, kingship, power

‘I disclaim all my paternal care, propinquity and property of blood’

Plosive alliteration - tone of spitting rage and irrotional anger in his blindness and naivity. Foreshadows his madness.

Themes: Madness, Blindness, Family/ Fatherhood, Natural vs Unnatural

‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’

‘Dragon’ - an ancient symbol of Britain, ecchoing similar arrogance in the royal ‘we’ of his assertion of power. Alos, the monsterous imagery depicts the corrupt power he holds, in addition to his irratic, irrational anger foreshadowing his madness.

Themes: Kingship, madness, blindness.

‘Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven’

‘O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!’

Aligns himself with Gloucester - ‘my old heart’

Imagery of pushing his heart down implies Lear is afraid of what he sees as a threat to his masculinity. ‘Rising heart’ is a reference to hysteria, commonly associated with women in the Jacobean period. (AO3)

Themes: Love, family, women

‘Struck me with her tongue, most serpent-like’

Animalistic imagery - cold-blooded creature connoting to Edenic imagery and Regan as the evil, intensifying his own weakness by contrast.

Themes: Family, Women, Deceit, evil, corruption

‘Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, in my corrupted blood’

List of insults - problems in the family that are unfixable, aligning Regan with a disease, intensifying her evil.

Themes: Evil, corruption, Clarity

‘Thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter’

Bodily imagery reduces them just to the physical body- mental instability.

Analepsis to disowning Cordelia, showing regret? with repeated possessive determiner ‘my’.

Themes: Regret/ guilt, Family.

‘I am a man more sinned against than sinning’

Lineation with end-focus on ‘man’- awareness of his morality and fragility, and draws attention to a humility or self-pity with the body natural (AO3)

Themes: suffering, identity, tragedy, (in)justice

‘A poor, inform, weak and despised old man’