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For some, this meant treating the tragedy as a grim witness to the absurdity of life in a heartless universe; for others, it meant hailing it as proof that human dignity can be salvaged from the most unspeakable agony and despair.
The Fool’s teasing prophecy juxtaposes utopian possibilities with dystopian actualities, encapsulating the battle between the way things are and the way they could be that rages at the core of the tragedy.
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
’Tis the infirmity of his age. Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.
LEAR I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad. I will not trouble thee, my child. Farewell. We’ll no more meet, no more see one another. But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter – Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh, Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle, 220 In my corrupted blood. But I’ll not chide thee. Let shame come when it will, I do not call it.
GLOUCESTER Alack, the night comes on and the bleak winds Do sorely ruffle. For many miles about There’s scarce a bush.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-curriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world,
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.
When we are born we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools. – This’s a good block.
EDGAR The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
