France’s explanation of Cordelia’s honesty | “Sure her offence, / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it”France |
Lear’s fault disrupted his relationship with Cordelia | “like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature / From the fixed place”Lear |
Lear’s condemnation of Cordelia’s unnaturalness | “A wretch whom nature is ashamed / Almost to acknowledge hers”Lear |
Edmund’s address to Nature | “Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound. Wherefore should I / Stand in the plague of custom […]?”Edmund |
Lear summons nature to make Goneril sterile | “Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear! / Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend / To make this creature fruitful! / Into her womb convey sterility, / Dry up in her the organs of increase”Lear |
Edmund’s acceptance of his inherent evil | “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature”Edmund |
Edmund’s plot to exploit Edgar’s natural goodness | “A brother noble, / Whose nature is so far from doing harms, / That he suspects none”Edmund |
Gloucester’s condemnation of Edgar | “Abhorred villain! / Unnatural, detested, brutish villain – worse than brutish!”Gloucester |
Gloucester’s explanation for political and familial chaos | “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father”Gloucester |
Lear’s cry for promiscuity | “Let copulation thrive, / For Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father / Than were my daughters got ‘tween the lawful sheets”Lear |
Lear calls on Regan to know better as the kinder daughter | “Thou better knowst / The offices of nature, bond of childhood”Lear |
Kent’s condemnation of Oswald | “nature disclaims in thee – a tailor made thee”Kent |
Command of the wind | “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”Lear |
Lear’s rejection of shelter, experiencing hardship like the animals of the natural world | “I abjure all roofs, and choose / To wage against the enmity o’th’air – / To be a comrade with the wolf and owl”Lear |
Knight’s personification/anthropomorphism of the storm | “blasts with eyeless rage” “the belly-pinched wolf”Knight |
Body can’t function when mind doesn’t work properly | “We are not ourselves, / When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind / To suffer with the body”Lear |
Calls on Nature to wreak havoc | “And thou, all-shaking thunder, / Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world, / Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once / That make ingrateful man!”Lear |
Nature does not require excess | “Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beasts”Lear |
Gloucester calls on Edmund to save him | “Edmund, enkindle all the sparks of nature / To quit this horrid act”Gloucester |
The world will come to Lear’s state of ruin shortly | “O ruined piece of nature, this great world / Shall so wear out to naught”Gloucester |
The storm is too much for humans to bear | “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure”Kent |
Calls on nature to heal Lear | “All you unpublished virtues of the earth, / Spring forth with my tears. Be aidant and remediate”Cordelia |
Cordelia laid on the ground dead | “She’s dead as earth”Lear |
Rolf Soellner – A03/A04Aristotelian versus Platonian / Stoic view of nature | Aristotelians believed that the body influences the mind, whereas Plato and the Stoics supported by The Defence believed the mind should reject such influence – “Nature commands the mind” (to control the body) |
King Lear Themes: Nature
July 17, 2019