1,022 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2017
    1. the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father are not fit for your beholding.

      Cornwall knows that Edmund is capable of killing his father=> dark verbal irony

    1. When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.        85 How light and portable my pain seems now, When that which makes me bend makes the king bow; He childed as I father’d! Tom, away! Mark the high noises, and thyself bewray When false opinion, whose wrong thought defiles thee,        90 In thy just proof repeals and reconciles thee.

      couplets

    2. What store her heart is made on. Stop her there! Arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place! False justicer, why hast thou let her ’scape?

      Lear imagines that she flees the courtroom

    3. Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?   Thy sheep be in the corn; And for one blast of thy minikin mouth,   Thy sheep shall take no harm.

      lyrics of a song=> sheep comes to no harm unless sheperd sings

    1. Child Rowland to the dark tower came,        130 His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.

      from Jack the Giant Killer, intensifies the terror of the moment

    2. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman: keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend.

      Tom's own wisdom from experience

    3. A servingman, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress’s heart, and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven; one that slept in the contriving of lust

      creates a backstory to Tom's misery

    4. Take heed o’ the foul fiend. Obey thy parents; keep thy word justly; swear not; commit not with man’s sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array.

      Tom recites catechism=> drawn from 10 commandments

    1. This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke Instantly know; and of that letter too: This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me That which my father loses; no less than all: The younger rises when the old doth fall. 

      True Machiavelli style=> Edmund chooses his own selfish purposes first

    1. I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious.

      Lear sympathizes with the fool=> begins to "see" better

    2. Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipp’d of justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand; Thou perjur’d, and thou simular of virtue That art incestuous; caitiff, to pieces shake,        45 That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practis’d on man’s life; close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man More sinn’d against than sinning.

      talks in apostrophe to various kinds of sinners in world

    3. The cod-piece that will house   Before the head has any, The head and he shall louse;   So beggars marry many.

      man who takes woman before he has a house will have to share her lice

    4. Lear.  Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;        15 I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children, You owe me no subscription: then, let fall Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man. But yet I call you servile ministers,        20 That have with two pernicious daughters join’d

      Lear addresses the storm-accuses it as conspiring against him with daughters