A collection of quotes from Shakespeare's 'King Lear' organised by theme. Helpful for creating essay plans, writing essays, or creating flashcards off of in preparation for exams. Themes are: justice, authority/kingship/power, family relationships, age and generational divide/mortality etc.
'King Lear' Essay Plans for Edexcel A Level English
'King Lear' Context and Critical Opinions
Grade A essay on “family relationships” in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’
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PEARSON (PEARSON)
English Literature 2015
Unit 1 - Drama
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Lear Quote Bank
Justice
★ Gloucester humiliating Edmund in 1.1. However, this does not justify the extent to
which Edmund goes to take revenge.
★ ‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care’
★ ‘Only we shall retain the name, and all th’addition to a king’
★ ‘Power to flattery bows’ / ‘majesty to folly’ / ‘hideous rashness’ - Kent
★ ‘Time will unfold what plighted cunning hides’ - Cordelia
★ ‘Now gods, stand up for bastards!’
★ ‘I did her wrong’
★ ‘That such a slave should wear a sword, who wears no honesty’ - Kent, about
Oswald
★ Kent’s ‘purposed low correction is such as basest…wretches…are punished with’ -
Gloucester
★ ‘Fortune, good night: smile once more; turn thy wheel’
★ ‘Fortune, that arrant whore, ne’er turn the key to the poor’
★ ‘I gave you all-’
★ ‘...needs taste his folly’ - Goneril
★ ‘To wilful men the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters’
- Regan
★ ‘Tremble, thou wretch, that hast within thee undivulged crimes, unwhipped of justice’
★ ‘I am a man more sinned against than sinning’
★ ‘Poor naked wretches’ / ‘O, I have ta’en too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
expose thyself to feel what wretches feel’
★ ‘How malicious is my fortune, that I must repent to be just?’ - Edmund
★ ‘The gods reward your kindness’ - of course, Gloucester isn’t rewarded in the end.
★ The mock trial: Edgar becomes the ‘most learned justice’ and the ‘robed man of
justice’ → distorted sense of human order in the chaos of nature.
★ Gloucester’s blinding: ‘I shall see the winged vengeance overtake such children’.
Gloucester still has faith in the ‘kind gods’ → futile → ‘O cruel! O you gods!’
○ ‘Now heaven help him!’, the irony being that heaven doesn’t seem to exist in
the world of Lear.
★ ‘The lamentable change is from the best, the worst returns to laughter’
★ ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport’
★ ‘That I am wretched makes thee the happier…let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
that slaves your ordinance, that will not see because he does not feel, feel your
power quickly’ - Gloucester, to the heavens
★ ‘The stars above govern our conditions’
★ Nature’s ‘great opposeless wills’
★ ‘Is wretchedness deprived that benefit to end itself by death’
★ ‘See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief’
★ ‘Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks’
★ Justice for Kent: he claims ‘to be acknowledged, madam, is o’erpaid’, yet still seeks
recognition for this goodness from Lear in 5.3, and never really gets it. He has
suffered, doing Lear ‘service improper for a slave’
★ Cordelia as a restorer of justice: ‘o you kind gods! Cure this great breach in his
abused nature’ / ‘let this kiss repair those violent harms…’
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