King Lear

This is where the play's language reaches its highest pitch. Lear opens with a command to the storm: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout / Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!" He calls on thunder to "strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world" and crack nature's moulds — he would unmake creation itself rather than endure what his daughters have done to him. The Fool tries to pull him toward shelter. "Court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o' door," he says. It's good advice, delivered as always in the register of a joke, and Lear ignores it. His second speech makes a distinction that matters. The storm, he says, owes him nothing: "I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children; you owe me no subscription: then let fall your horrible pleasure." He can accept the weather's violence because it is indifferent. What he cannot accept is that his daughters — whom he gave everything — have joined with it against him. He calls the elements "servile ministers" for allying with "two pernicious daughters" against a head "so old and white as this." Then, abruptly: "No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing." Kent arrives, drenched, and tells him no night like this has existed in his memory — "man's nature cannot carry the affliction, nor the fear." Lear responds not with gratitude but with a turn inward and outward at once. Let the gods use the storm to expose hidden sins, he says — the perjured, the violent, the secretly corrupt. And then the line that defines his self-understanding at this moment: "I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning." Kent offers a hovel nearby. Something shifts. "My wits begin to turn," Lear says — and then looks at the Fool: "How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself." It is the first time in the play he asks after someone else's comfort. He adds: "I have one part in my heart that's sorry yet for thee." They go to the hovel. The Fool delivers a final absurdist prophecy about a world turned upside down — and then the stage is empty.