KING LEAR – Fate vs Free will

Kent (To Lear): ‘My life I never held but as a prawn’ (1.1)
Edmond: ‘Stand in the plague of custom’ (1.2)
Edmond: ‘I grow, I prosper, now Gods stand up for the bastards’ (1.2)
Gloucester: ‘This villain of mine comes under the prediction there’s son against father’ (1.2)
Edmond: ‘let me, if not by birth, have land by wit’ (1.2)
Edmond: ‘We make guilty of our disasters of the sun, the moon, the stars as if we were villains of necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion”. (1.2)
Lear (to Goneril): ‘I’ll assume the shape that thou doth think I have cast off forever’ (1.4)
Cornwall (to Edmond): ‘Loval and natural boy’ (2.3)
Lear (to Regan): ‘Thou better know’st the offices of nature, the bonds of childhood’ (2.4)
Edgar: ‘I am nothing’ (2.3)
Edmond: ‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’ (3.3)
Cornwall (about Gloucester fate): ‘which men may blame but not control’ (3.7)
Gloucester: ‘Give me some help! – O cruel! O you gods!’ (3.7)
Gloucester ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods; They kill us for their sport’ (4.1)
Gloucester: ‘O you mighty gods’ (4.5)
Gloucester: ‘your great opposeless wills’ (4.5)
Edgar: ‘ Think that the clearest gods.. have preserved thee’ (4.5)
Edgar: ‘The gods are justices, and of out pleasant vices make instruments to plague us’ (5.3)
Edmond: ‘The wheel is come full circle. I am here’ (5.3)
Albany: ‘This judgment of the heavens, that make us tremble’ (5.3)
Jocasta: ‘No one can forecast the future’
Tiresias: ‘I can’t change the future. What will happen, will happen whatever I say’
(OED): ‘Suffering. Brief happiness. Pain is mortal man’s destiny’
(OED): ‘You were marked out for suffering that day you were born’ (ankles)
(OED): ‘Haven’t you of all people learnt to trust the Gods’
(OED): ‘We live our lives at the mercy of chance, the purest coincidence’
(OED): ‘My God, Youre doomed, you can’t escape’
July 10, 2019