"King Lear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this point of address. I myself, for example, am the meekest of men, and in abhorrence of slavery yield to no human creature, and yet I don't admit the sequence that I want Uncle Tom (or Aunt Tomasina) to expound "King Lear" to me. And I believe my case to be ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... was more depressing than ever. During the lonely days, and still more lonely nights, he thought much about the past. He knew that he had made a failure of life, and that he had nothing to live for now. At times he would endeavor to fan the coals of rebellion by reading "King Lear," "Timon of Athens," and the story of Old Aeneas. But the effect was never lasting, and when the artificial stimulation subsided he was more depressed ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... vice are exhibited in daily, homespun dress, and stalking abroad through the centuries, the generous and brave nobility of King Lear, Caesar, Othello, and Hamlet, will be seen in marked contrast to Shylock, Brutus, Cassius, Iago, Gloster and Macbeth. His fools and wits were philosophers, while many of his kings, queens, dukes, lords and ladies were sneaks, frauds ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... "Clarissa" that he prized; "for give me a sick-bed and a dying lady," said he, "and I'll be pathetic myself. But Richardson had picked the kernel of life," he said, "while Fielding was contented with the husk." It was not King Lear cursing his daughters, or deprecating the storm, that I remember his commendations of; but Iago's ingenious malice and subtle revenge; or Prince Hal's gay compliance with the vices of Falstaff, whom he all along despised. Those plays had indeed ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... B.C. is a string of the fairy tales, all about Theseus and Heracles and Oedipus and Minos and Perseus is a Cabinet des Fees, a collection of fairy tales. Shakespeare took them and put bits of them into 'King Lear' and other plays; he could not have made them up himself, great as he was. Let ladies and gentlemen think of this when they sit down to write fairy tales, and have them nicely typed, and send them to Messrs. Longman & Co. to be published. They think that to write a new fairy tale is easy work. They ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... the floor in front of my bookcase. From across the room a hitburner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting a smoking swathe across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from sporting a cooked stripe ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... mentioned—a species of uninspired Thoreau. His name was Benjamin Lear. So far as his craziness went, he might have been a lineal descendant of that ancient king of Britain who figures on Shakespeare's page. Family dissensions made a recluse of King Lear; but in the case of Benjamin there were no mitigating circumstances. He had no family to trouble him, and his realm remained undivided. He owned an excellent farm on the south side of Sagamore Creek, a little to the west of the bridge, and might have lived at ease, if personal comfort had not been ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... memory. Utilize the line by making it the refrain of a ballade or the ending of some similar verse form. Browning composed his "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," around that single line taken from a song in "King Lear." It is possible to go even further and with a stanza—say from some Elizabethan song—construct about it the completed poem. Rossetti has done this with one of Ophelia's ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... should be enlivened by a concert of fiddles. There appear to be two legitimate modes of interweaving tragedy with something like comedy. The first and most easy, which has often been resorted to, is to make the lower or less marked characters of the drama, like the porter in "Macbeth," or the fool in "King Lear," speak the language appropriated to their station, even in the midst of the distresses of the piece; nay, they may be permitted to have some slight under-intrigue of their own. This, however, requires the exertion of much taste and discrimination; for if we are once seriously and deeply ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... or by the violence of rival claimants to their thrones. The pretended records contain a vast number of legends, of very little interest or value, as the reader will readily admit when we tell him that the famous story of King Lear is the most entertaining one in the whole ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... having come to his own again, Butler obtained permission in November 1662 to print the first part of 'Hudibras.' The quaint title of this poem has attracted much curious cavil. The name is used by Milton, Spenser, and Robert of Gloucester for an early king of Britain, the grandfather of King Lear; and by Ben Jonson—from whom Butler evidently adopted it—for a swaggering fellow in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... daughter of King Lear, and wife of the duke of Cornwall. Having received the half of her father's king-[TN-119] she refused to entertain him with his suite. On the death of her husband, she designed to marry Edmund, natural son of the earl of Gloster, and was poisoned by her elder ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... dream!—a dream in which she sat in corners with her eyes cast down; flushed whenever she was addressed; stammered whenever she answered a question, and nearly died of heart failure when subjected to an examination of any sort. She delighted the committee when reading at sight from "King Lear," but somewhat discouraged them when she could not tell the capital of the United States. She admitted that her former teacher, Miss Dearborn, might have mentioned it, but if so she had ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... violins haunting the G string,—while a harp and three flutes carry the burden of the accompaniment gracefully); a pleasant "Reverie" for string orchestra, harp, and organ; and two impromptus for string orchestra, a "Meditation" representing Cordelia brooding tenderly over the slumbering King Lear,—art ministering very tenderly to the mood,—and a cleverly ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... mounted in the observatory there by Grubb, of Dublin. The weather was so unfavorable that it was necessary to remain two weeks, waiting for an opportunity to see the stars. One evening I visited the theatre to see Edwin Booth, in his celebrated tour over the Continent, play King Lear to the applauding Viennese. But evening amusements cannot be utilized to kill time during the day. Among the tasks I had projected was that of rediscussing all the observations made on the transits of Venus which had occurred in 1761 ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... at the inn for a fortnight, until he was able to settle down comfortably in lodgings, in Dove Court, Mansion House. He was soon hard at work upon 'The Death of Rizzio,' adorning his walls with pictures he had brought with him or sent for afterwards from Kendal, such as 'King Lear,' 'Elfrida,' 'The Death of Lefevre,' and a few portraits of friends. The Rizzio picture has been represented as 'a work of extraordinary merit, combining energetic action with strong expression.' Its fate ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... abrogated by the learned and crooked understanding of your single magnificent self! Of the heights of humanity you know nothing! You asserted the other day that, in certain circumstances, a barber or a scrubwoman might as fittingly be the protagonist of a tragedy as Lady Macbeth or King Lear! ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... decision with acclamation, and the two elder ones vied with one another in attempts to set her mind at rest by undertaking everything, and promising for themselves and the children perfect regularity and harmony. Sophy, with a bluntness that King Lear would have highly disapproved, said, 'She was glad mamma was going, but she knew they should be all at sixes and sevens. She would do her best, and very bad it ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unfailing loyalty, follows his master with quip and quirk, into exile. When all, even his daughters, have forsaken King Lear, the fool bares himself to the storm and covers the shaking old man with his own cloak. And when in our own day we meet the avatars of Trinculo, Costard, Mercutio and Jacques, we find they are men of tender susceptibilities, generous ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... say? It seems to me that any more suicidal thing than throwing away the borough never was done. Who will thank you? What additional support will you get? How will it increase your power? It's like King Lear throwing off his clothes in the storm because his daughters turned him out. And you didn't do it because you ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... "Yet it is not true that execution is everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects, equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best."[75] Though each is perfect in its kind, there can be no difficulty in deciding the question of greatness between "King Lear" and "The Comedy of Errors." "The greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions: for the power of imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... up with an ever-increasing violence, until it seemed that even the stalled car would be compelled to yield to its force. Claire had never seen it rain harder; the storm had a vindictive fury that reminded her of the dreadful tempest in "King Lear." ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... lamentably disgraced himself at Sir Charles Mirabel's table, by premature inebriation. A carriage was called for him: the hospitable door was shut upon him. Often and sadly did he speak to his friends at the Kitchen of his resemblance to King Lear in the plee—of his having a thankless choild, bedad—of his being a pore worn-out lonely old man, dthriven to dthrinking by ingratitude, and seeking to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said Nat, "I have been well paid to-night. There is a great deal to be learned in witnessing one such performance. I can read Shakspeare now with more interest and profit than ever. I want to hear 'The Tempest' played now, and 'King Lear,' and 'Hamlet,' and 'Romeo and Juliet,' and I mean to ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... time had left him behind. The younger Holland shook its head over the old gentleman of the past century, with his antagonism for the poetry of the day and his rage against Shakespeare and the latter's "puerile" 'King Lear.' For to Bilderdijk even more than to Voltaire, Shakespeare was an abomination. Then in 1830 he received the severest blow of his life: Katherina Wilhelmina died. This happened in Haarlem, whither he had gone in 1827. With this calamity his strength was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... follow Dr. Prior on this word: "Harlock, as usually printed in 'King Lear' and in Drayton, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... not being made ruler of the Tuatha Dea, but was later reconciled when the daughter of Bodb Dearg was given to him as his wife. On her death, he married her sister, who transformed her step-children into swans.[304] Ler is the equivalent of the Brythonic Llyr, later immortalised by Shakespeare as King Lear. ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... says something like this: "They can because they think they can," and I heartily concur. Some one tells us that Kent in "King Lear" got his name from the Anglo-Saxon word can and he was aptly named, in view of Virgil's statement. But can I cause my boys and girls to think they can? Why, most assuredly, if I am any sort of teacher. Otherwise I ought to be dealing with inanimate ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... regent aunt, but if my small cousin, the Most Christian King, should enter, I must be dethroned, and a succession of bows must ensue before we can either of us be seated. I always fear that I shall some day break out with the speech of King Lear's fool: 'Cry you mercy, I took you for a ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bright column told of the doings in the theatrical world—the plays produced, the actors appearing, the managers making announcements. Fannie Davenport was just opening at the Fifth Avenue. Daly was producing "King Lear." He read of the early departure for the season of a party composed of the Vanderbilts and their friends for Florida. An interesting shooting affray was on in the mountains of Kentucky. So he read, read, read, rocking in the warm room near the ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... and I daresay set many a female heart a palpitating. When he made his first appearance, there was just such a humming and clapping of hands as you may have heard when the celebrated Garrick comes upon the stage in King Lear, or King Richard, or any other top character. But how agreeably were we disappointed, when our young gentleman made such an oration as would not have disgraced a Pitt, an Egmont, or a Murray! while he spoke, all was hushed in admiration and attention; you could have almost heard a feather ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... The story of "King Lear" is one of the most pitiful of Shakespeare's play. It is about the thanklessness of children to a father. Old King Lear had three daughters—Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. He loved these ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... united in death; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the ambitious criminals; Hamlet, the young man with a great mind and a great heart but with a feeble will which collapses under too heavy a task and comes to the verge of insanity; Cordelia, the English Antigone, the devoted daughter of the proscribed King Lear; Falstaff, glutton, coward, diverting and gay, a kind of Anglo-Saxon Panurge. A whole dramatic literature has come from Shakespeare. To France he was introduced by Voltaire and then scorned by him because he had succeeded only too ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... was an English Poet-Laureate. It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel. Brady—equally modest—translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the train and went down to Mannheim to see "King Lear" played in German. It was a mistake. We sat in our seats three whole hours and never understood anything but the thunder and lightning; and even that was reversed to suit German ideas, for the thunder came first and the lightning ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... answer to the maid: "Who then is this Mam'selle Wieck? I know two Fraeulein Wieck only; they are my two little daughters here. I know no other!" As Litzmann says: "With so shrill a dissonance ended Clara's stay at Leipzig." He compares this exile of the daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia. But it was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving from his home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back to Berlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... of critics, concludes his remarks on King Lear with these words: "Of the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia, I will not venture to speak." Now if I attempt what Schlegel and others have left undone, it is because I feel that this general acknowledgment of her excellence can neither satisfy those who have studied ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the text that go far to justify this contention. We may be sure that Shakespeare, then at the zenith of his power, would not have stinted the measure of a work which seems to have taken more of his time than any previous play. Following closely upon "Macbeth" came "King Lear," produced at Whitehall for the Christmas festivities of 1606, and founded, like several of ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... many not herein named) included the Ghost, Laertes, Horatio and the Prince in "Hamlet," Dick in "The Confederacy," Captain Worthy in the "Fair Quaker of Deal," Pyrrhus, Cato, Young Bevil in the "Conscious Lovers," Tamerlane, Oronooko, Jaffier, Othello, King Lear, Hotspur, Wildair, Sir Charles Easy, Falstaff, Cassio, Macbeth, Banquo, Lennox, Henry VIII. and Cinna. Few living players ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... reading have been sufficiently general to possess me beforehand with a knowledge of most of the subjects to which a Painter is likely to have recourse; and, although I might be in some doubt as to the rightful fashion of the scabbard of King Lear's sword, for instance, I think I should know King Lear tolerably well, if I happened ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... Wait, now, here's something from King Lear. The sky is black, see? Rain is pouring down, thunder roars, lightning—zzz zzz zzz—splits the whole sky, ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... of Junction City, Kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in Kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "The Legal Status of Mrs. O'Rourke" and "King Lear in Kansas" ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the 'Frogs' as on the wisdom of the 'Republic.' It is all a mean shame of joy. When we come out from a performance of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' we feel as near to the stars as when we come out from 'King Lear.' For the joy of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than wisdom, their love is ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton |
