“Ha! Goneril with a white beard?” or “Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do ’t”
- Lear experiences hallucinations on Dover cliffs
- mistakes Gloucester for Goneril
- Lear’s mental reality has become a material reality for him
What does E.A.J. Honigmann note about the cap, or “coxcomb”?
- it is a symbol of the fool’s professionalism
specifically noted in the fool’s first introduction
What does Suzannah Lipscomb reflect on the portrait ‘The Family of Henry VIII’?
- identifies the presence of William Somer (the king’s fool) who epitomises the fool’s employment to inject frivolity into the stoicism of a king’s life, liberating madness of a socially accepted form
“Dost thou call me fool, boy?”
(fool replies) “All thy other titles thou hast given away that thou wast born with”
- Lear has selective autonomy over his political titles but the fool identifies that he holds an inescapably innate foolishness
“be Kent unmannerly/ When Lear is mad”
- complicates the tenses between “when” and “is”
- implies a repeat performance of what Lear so often rehearses
“That lord that counsell’d thee/ To give away thy land…”
- the fool reframes political advice through linguistic lunacy to which Lear is partially responsive, unpicking and inquiring of the fool’s meaning
“tears his white hair”
- his bodily deconstruction indicates the redundancy of his material self due to the domination of his mind over his body, explaining why Lear agitates the storm into redundancy
“Now, by Apollo—“
“Now, by Apollo, King,/ Thou swear’st thy gods in vain”
- Kent mocks Lear’s tawdry invocation to the gods
“…there’s hell,/ there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit, burning,/ scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!”
- in the midst of his misogynistic polemic he cries out
